1. Top Famous Quotes
    2. /
  2. Witold Gombrowicz Quotes

Top Witold Gombrowicz Quotes

Browse top 52 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Witold Gombrowicz.

Favorite Witold Gombrowicz Quotes

1. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
2. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
3. "Joey, it's high time, dear child. What will people say? If you don't want to be a doctor, at least be a womanizer, or a fancier of horses, be something... be something definite..." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
4. "I placed no trust in faiths, doctrines, ideologies, institutions. Thus I could stand only upon my own feet. But I was a Pole, molded by Polishness, living in Poland. And so I needed to look deeper for my ‘self,' in the place where it was no longer Polish but simply human" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
5. "W polowie drogi mojego zywota posrod ciemnego znalazlem sie lasu. Las ten co gorsza byl zielony." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
6. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
7. "It was too late to retreat - the world exists only because it is always too late to retreat." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
8. "Homeland is not a blot on a map but the living essence of man" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
9. "A universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
10. "Don't change the beggar into a conqueror, because it was the beggar who led you to conquest." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
11. "Many a beauty in her own room behaves repulsively till one splits one's sides." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
12. "To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
13. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
14. "Mnie Bóg, w zyciu moim, nigdy nie byl potrzebny - od najwczesniejszego dziecinstwa, ani przez piec minut - bylem zawsze samowystarczalny. / I have never in my life needed God - from the infancy, since I was 5, I was self-sufficient. (Dziennik 1956, XVIII Niedziela)" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
15. "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..." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
16. "Dzieje kultury wykazuja, ze glupota jest siostra blizniacza rozumu, ona rosnie najbujniej nie na glebie dziewiczej ignorancji , lecz na gruncie uprawnym siódmym potem doktorów i profesorów. Wielkie absurdy nie sa wymyslane przez tych, których rozum krzata sie wokól spraw codziennych. Nic dziwnego zatem, ze wlasnie najintensywniejsi mysliciele bywali producentami najwiekszego 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)" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
17. "Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
18. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
19. "Great! I've written something stupid, but I haven't signed a contract with anyone to produce solely wise and perfect works. I gave vent to my stupidity...and here I am, reborn." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
20. "Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
21. "Wielka Poezja bedac wielka i bedac poezja nie moze nie zachwycac nas, a wiec zachwyca!" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
22. "Our element is unending immaturity." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
23. "For Kierkegaard, for Heidegger, for Sartre, the more profound the awareness, the more authentic the existence. They measure honesty and the essence of experience by the degree of awareness. But is our humanity really built on awareness? Doesn't awareness--that forced, extreme awareness--arise among us, not from us, as something created by effort, the mutual perfecting of ourselves in it, the confirming of something that one philosopher forces onto another? Isn't man, therefore, in his private reality, something childish and always beneath his own awareness? And doesn't he feel awareness to be, at the same time, something alien, imposed and unimportant? If this is how it is, this furtive childhood, this concealed degradation are ready to explode your systems sooner or later." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
24. "Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
25. "Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
26. "Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
27. "You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
28. "I am a collection of the family's body parts." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
29. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
30. "... a novel which I called Pornografia. At that time it wasn't such a bad title, today, in view of the excess of pornography, it sounds banal, and in a few languages it was changed to Seduction." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
31. "I am very afraid of the devil. A strange confession from the lips of an unbeliever." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
32. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
33. "Istnieje gatunek zjawisk, których dzentelmen nie moze znac z tej przyczyny, ze gdyby je poznal, przestalby byc dzentelmenem." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
34. "Literatura powazna nie jest po to, zeby ulatwiac zycie, tylko zeby je utrudniac." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
35. "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!" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
36. "A jak tak se svými Papíry a Myslí dovádel, inteligentneji se stával stále stále inteligentnejším a ta jeho inteligence, sama sebou rozmnožená a sama na sobe obkrocmo sedíc, v tak ukrutnou inteligenci prerustala, že cloveka až hruza jímala!" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
37. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
38. "Byla to veliká odbornice na cekání, mírná, pasivní, nesmelá, a proto ji casto bolely zuby, nebot se skvele hodila do cekárny u zubare a její zuby o tom vedely." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
39. "Nie ufalem wiarom, doktrynom, ideologiom, instytucjom. Moglem wiec oprzec sie tylko na sobie. Ale przeciez bylem Polakiem, urobionym przez polskosc, zyjacym w Polsce. No wiec trzeba mi bylo poszukac mojego "ja" glebiej, tam gdzie ono juz nie bylo polskie, a po prostu czlowiecze." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
40. "Chcesz wiedziec kim jestes? Nie pytaj. Dzialaj. Dzialanie cie okresli i ustali. Z dzialania swojego sie dowiesz. Ale dzialac musisz jako "ja", jako jednostka, bo tylko wlasnych potrzeb, sklonnosci, namietnosci, koniecznosci mozesz byc pewny.Tylko takie dzialanie jest bezposrednie, jest prawdziwym wydobywaniem siebie z chaosu, autostwarzaniem. Reszta - czyz to nie recytowanie, wypelnianie schematów, tandeta, kicz?" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
41. "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!" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
42. "La camera si riempì ora di azioni decise e precise, le quali però, essendo nate dalla noia, dall'oziosità, dal capriccio, celavano in sé una certa dose di imbecillità." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
43. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
44. "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" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
45. "(…) jest naiwnoscia mniemanie, jakoby zachwyt nasz wobec dziela sztuki z nas samych pochodzil: ze zachwyt ten w sporej mierze nie rodzi sie z ludzi, ale miedzy ludzmi, i jest to tak jakbysmy wzajemnie zmuszali sie do zachwytu (choc nikt „osobiscie" 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)" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
46. "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." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
47. "Ilez zdan mozna utworzyc z dwudziestu czterech liter alfabetu? Ilez znaczen mozna wyprowadzic z setek chwastów, grudek i innych drobiazgów?" ~ Witold Gombrowicz
48. "Average intelligence loves blinders, which facilitate an even trot; but a brisker and livelier intelligence desires uncertainty, risk, a play of more deceptive and elusive forces...where one can preserve flight, pride, joke, confession, rapture, play, struggle." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
49. "Czy wiec nic nigdy nie moze zostac naprawde wyrazone, oddane w swoim stawaniu sie anonimowym, nikt nigdy nie zdola oddac belkotu rodzacej sie chwili, jak to jest, ze, urodzeni z chaosu nie mozemy nigdy z nim sie zetknac, zaledwie spojrzymy, a juz pod naszym spojrzeniem rodzi sie porzadek... i ksztalt..." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
50. "Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it." ~ Witold Gombrowicz
First«12»Last

Witold Gombrowicz Quotes Pictures

Witold Gombrowicz Quotes
Witold Gombrowicz Quotes
Witold Gombrowicz Quotes

Today's Quote

As a leader it is your job to protect the missional integrity of the Jesus gathering to which you have been called. It is your responsibility to see to it that the church under your care continues as a gathering of people in process; a place where the curious,the unconvinced, the sceptical, the used-to-believe and the broken, as well as the committed, informed and sold-out come together around Peter's declaration that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God."
Author: Andy Stanley

What Did Witold Gombrowicz Talk About?

Lit
Wit
Thin
Ten
Self
Ear
Cause
Use
Era
Con
Here
End
Sin
Ego
Ought
Tan
Does
Hen
Lie
Per
Old
Hum
Born
Himself
Act
Thou
Pen
Low
Los
Poet
Raw
Ways
Ours
Land
King
Between
Artist
Child
Hang
Though
Humanity
Stupid
Deep
Sit
Ally
Cat
Force
Exist
Essence
Since

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Copyright © 2023 Top Famous Quotes. All Rights Reserved. | New Quotes | Topic List | Author List | Privacy Policy | About Us | Contact Us |