Witold Gombrowicz Quotes

Isn't it true (I thought), that one is almost never present, or rather never fully present, and that's because we have only a halfhearted, chaotic and slipshod, disgraceful and vile relationship with out surroundings.

The difference between western and eastern intellectuals is that the former have not been kicked in the ass enough.

Two conspirators with a frog, following the line of a whiffletree.

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.

I do not fear that "future generations will not read novels," etc. It is probably a complete misunderstanding to conceive of serious art in categories of production, market, readers, supply and demand( ... )art is not the fabrication of stories for readers but a spiritual cohabitation, something so tense and so separate from science, even contradictory to it, that there can be no competition between them. If someone fine, dignified, prolific, brilliant (this is how one ought to speak of artists this is the language art demands) is born in the future, if someone unique and unrepeatable is born, a Bach, a Rembrandt, then he will win people over, charm and seduce them ...

If he [the Artist] were to take up the pen it would be ... to better express his individuality and explain it to others; or else to put his internal affairs in order ... to deepen and sharpen his relationship with his fellow men because other souls exert an immense and creative influence on our soul; or to try to fight for a world as he would like it to be, for a world that is indispensable to his life.

I even stopped walking to give some thought to the fact that everyone, after all, wants to be himself, so I too want to be myself, for example who would love syphilis, of course no one loves syphilis, but after all, a syphilitic man also wants to be himself, namely a syphilitic, it is easy to say "I want to be well again," and yet it sounds strange, as if to say "I don't want to be who I am.

It is not without pleasure that i can tell my majestic colleagues who write for humanity, and in the name of humanity, that i have never written a single word other than for a selfish purpose; but at, each time, the work betrayed me and escaped from me

I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their soules a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature.

When you, existentialists, speak to me of consciousness, fear, and nothingness, I burst with laughter not because I don't agree with you, but because I must agree with you. I agreed and, loo and behold, nothing happened ... I laugh because I delight in fear, play with nothingness, and toy with responsibility. Death does not exist.

I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.

Listen, nitwit, what good will it do you to know whether I am "sincere" or "insincere"? What does this have to do with whether or not my thoughts are right? I can utter a soaring truth "insincerely" and say the stupidest thing "sincerely". Learn to judge the thought independently of who says it or how.

If you were to stare at this box of matches, you could extract entire worlds out of it. If you search for tastes in a book, you will certainly find them because it was said: seek and ye shall find. But a critic should not rifle, search. Let him sit back with folded arms, waiting for the book to find him. Talents should not be sought with a microscope, a talent should let people know about itself by striking at all the bells.

I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.

It was too late to retreat - the world exists only because it is always too late to retreat.

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.

Wednesday

Wind and spindles of clouds crowding the peaks from the south. A lone chicken pecks away on the lawn....
To be a concrete man. To be an individual. Not to strive to transform the whole world. To live in the world, changing it only as much as possible from within the reach of my nature. To become real in harmony with my needs, my individual needs.
I do not want to say that collective and abstract thought, that Humanity as such, are not important. Yet a certain balance must be restored. The most modern direction of is one that will rediscover the individual man.

Dzieje kultury wykazują, ze glupota jest siostrą bliźniaczą rozumu, ona rośnie najbujniej nie na glebie dziewiczej ignorancji , lecz na gruncie uprawnym siódmym potem doktorów i profesorów. Wielkie absurdy nie są wymyślane przez tych, których rozum krząta się wokól spraw codziennych. Nic dziwnego zatem, ze wlaśnie najintensywniejsi myśliciele bywali producentami największego glupstwa. / The history of culture shows that foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom. It does not flourish on the fields of pure ignorance but on the fields tirelessly plowed by doctors and professors. Great absurdities do not flourish where one is busy with everyday life. No wonder that sometimes most vigorous thinkers come up with utmost stupidities. (Dziennik 1956, XIX, Thursday)

You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire.

My literature must remain that which it is. Especially that something which does not fit into politics and does not want to serve it. I cultivate just one politics: my own. I am a separate state.

(…) jest naiwnością mniemanie, jakoby zachwyt nasz wobec dziela sztuki z nas samych pochodzil: ze zachwyt ten w sporej mierze nie rodzi się z ludzi, ale między ludźmi, i jest to tak jakbyśmy wzajemnie zmuszali się do zachwytu (choc nikt „osobiście" nie jest zachwycony). / It is naive to believe that the admiration for a masterpiece is spontaneous. The admiration, to a great extent, is not born within people but between people, as if we forced each other to admire (while no one is "personally" enraptured). (Dziennik, 1956, XX, Wtorek I)

Why, my man is created from the outside, that is, he is inauthentic in essence- he is always not-himself, because he is determined by form, which is born between people. His "I", therefore, is marked for him in that "interhumanity." An eternal actor, but a natural one, because his artificiality is inborn, it makes up a feature of his humanity-to be a man means to be an actor-to be a man means to pretend to be a man-to be a man means to "act like" a man while not being one deep inside-to be a man is to recite humanity.

Many a beauty in her own room behaves repulsively till one splits one's sides.

We say 'forest' but this word is made of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unencompassed. The earth. Clods of dirt. Pebbles. On a clear day you rest among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, grass, bushes, a dog (or a cat), a chair, but that changes when you realize that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm.

Don't be fooled by your own wisdom

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.

The emptiness of our boredom met with the emptiness of these supposed signs.

And just as he had earlier, during their lunch hour, insinuated the problem of innocence to the formalists - which had incensed them and boosted their immaturity a hundredfold - he was now making an issue of my modern legs. And there I was, listening and lapping it all up - his linking the calves of my legs with those of the new generation - and coming to feel the cruelty of youth toward old calves! And there was also a kind of leg camaraderie with the schoolgirl, plus a clandestine, voluptuous collusion of legs, plus leg patriotism, plus the impudence of young legs, plus leg poetry, plus young-blooded pride in the calf of the leg, and a cult of the calf of the leg. Oh, what a fiendish body part!

Don't change the beggar into a conqueror, because it was the beggar who led you to conquest.

There were three of us; Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and myself
the three muskateers of the Polish avant-garde between the wars. Only Witkiewicz remains to be discovered.

To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.

The world was indeed a kind of screen and did not manifest itself other than by passing me on and on - I was just the bouncing ball that objects played with!

Homeland is not a blot on a map but the living essence of man

You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't ... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.

Q: What are your plans for the future? A: Grave.

From the very last interview by Bettina L. Knapp (July 1969).

I am a collection of the family's body parts.