Witold Gombrowicz Quotes

25 quotes in 426 categories

• 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…
• To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
• 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…
• A universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed.
• I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.
• 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…
• 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.
• When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has”: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to…
• It is in the prime of youth that man sinks into empty phrases and grimaces. It's in this smithy that our maturity is forged.
• 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…
• 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.
• I could have protested of course, who says I couldn't--I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and--no matter…
• Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.
• Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
• Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.
• 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…
• 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!
• Our element is unending immaturity.
• Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.

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