Antal Szerb Quotes

The matter could in fact have been resolved quite simply if all those round the table had been equally intelligent. But in this life that is rarely given.

The nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people's minds away from the reality of death.

If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn't be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois.

We were so intimate that it wasn't possible to flirt or fall in love with one another. For love, there has to be a distance across which the lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course an illusion, because love in fact separate people. Love is a polarity. Two lovers are the two oppositely charged poles of the universe.

[The eighteenth century] was the century, as we are frequently told, of women - the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme du Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy - the oldest culture of the Mediterranean - was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who 'married out', moving into the wife's extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. [...] In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time [...] and all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people.

These peoples probably feared death even more than we do. Our civilisation presents us with a marvellous mental machinery designed to help us forget, for most of our lives, that one day we too will die. In time we manage to push death out of our consciousness, just as we have done with the existence of God. That's what civilisation does. But for these archaic peoples nothing was more immediately apparent than death and the dead, I mean actual dead people, whose mysterious para-existence, fate, and vengeful fury constantly preoccupied them. They had a tremendous horror of death and the dead. But then of course in their minds everything was more ambiguous than it is for us. Opposites sat much closer. The fear of death and the desire for death were intimately juxtaposed in their minds, and the fear was often a form of desire, the desire a form of fear.

Everyone has to find his own way to die.

Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That's why the church won't allow eunuchs to become priests.

You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you're just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.

The stronger civilization becomes, the more deeply the love of death is buried in the subconscious.

We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.

The sense of impending disaster hung over the garden like a chandelier.

For love, there has to be a distance across which lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course just an illusion, because love in fact separates people. Love is a polarity.

Tell me,' he asked, with some embarassment, as we strolled along: 'you're a bloody German, aren't you?'
'Oh, no. I'm Hungarian.'
'Hungarian?'
'Hungarian.'
'What's that? Is that a country? Or you are just having me on?
'Not at all. On my word of honour, it is a country.'
'And where do you Hungarians live?'
'In Hungary. Between Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia'.
'Come off it. Those places were made up by Shakespeare.

It is not the business of a Queen to be human.

Nothing is more frightening than the completely inexplicable.

If an aristocrat became bankrupt he looked to the sunshine of royal providence [ ... ] but when the nobility sank too low to qualify for royal notice, they became fraudsters, trading on the display of rank: the man would become a card-sharper or gigolo, while the woman sold herself. Actual work would have been unthinkable. It would have offended against the ancient order of things, which assigned that role to the middle classes and the peasantry. This concept is difficult to connect with our modern view of the world, but its very absurdity follows directly from the fact that everything in its old order was so firm and wonderful - with everything in its eternally appointed place and moving in fixed circles like the stars. There was no changing your lot in life at will: it was assigned to you forever, by birth. If you fell below your appointed station, you couldn't just swap it for another - you simply plummeted into the void.