Antal Szerb Quotes & Sayings

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. — Antal Szerb

And while there is life there is always the chance that something might happen ... — Antal Szerb

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. — Antal Szerb

If someone wants to give you money, whatever the source, you should take it. Every religious-historical authority agrees about that. — Antal Szerb

Nothing is more frightening than the completely inexplicable. — Antal Szerb

Everyone has to find his own way to die. — Antal Szerb

I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who 'apply learning to real life', like engineers who turn to propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe's words, as: 'life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green'. — Antal Szerb

In London November isn't a month, it's a state of mind. — Antal Szerb

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. — Antal Szerb

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

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

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. — Antal Szerb

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. — Antal Szerb

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

The French by their nature had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored. — Antal Szerb

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. — Antal Szerb

The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia. — Antal Szerb

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. — Antal Szerb

Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages. — Antal Szerb

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. — Antal Szerb

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

I really dislike the sort of people who aren't like other people. It's true other people are so boring. But so are the ones who aren't like them. — Antal Szerb