Nescio Quotes & Sayings

Koekebakker, I feel so strange inside.' 'Well you certainly smell like jenever,' I said. 'No,' Japi said, ' it's not the jenever. I think my soul is too big. — Nescio

Oh but to write what you think is so amazing- whoosh, whoosh, you don't even know how you're doing it and suddenly there it is, exactly the way it has to be. And when you read it later you're right back in your earlier life again and yet you don't know if you're yourself or someone else. — Nescio

The unknown doesn't bother me. I nod now and then to the beautiful women plucking the flowers in my gardens and I hear the wind rustling through the high pines, through the forests of certainty, of knowing that all this exists whenever I decide to think it. I am grateful that this has been given to me. And I puff on my pipe in all humility and feel like God himself, who is infinity itself. I sit there aimlessly, God's aim is aimlessness.

But to keep this awareness always is granted to no man — Nescio

WE WERE kids - but good kids. If I may say so myself. We're much smarter now, so smart it's pathetic. — Nescio

God's throne is still unshaken. His world just takes its course. Now and then God smiles for a moment about the important gentlemen who think they're really something. A new batch of little Titans are still busy piling up little boulders so that they can topple him down off his heights and arrange the world the way they think it should be. He only laughs, and thinks: "That's good, boys. You may be crazy but I still like you better than the proper, sensible gentlemen. I'm sorry you have to break your necks and I have to let the gentlemen thrive, but I'm only God."
And So everything takes its little course, and woe to those who ask: Why? — Nescio

My thoughts are an ocean, they wash woefully up against their limits. — Nescio

The larks were singing everywhere, a heron flew past, the sky was so high in the trees were wrestling all around the house and the light-- could you catch the light and hug it tight and take it inside you? — Nescio

...He couldn't do anything, so he didn't do anything. And after all, you can't express things by the way you feel them. He had just one wish: to overcome the body, to no longer feel hunger or exhaustion, cold or rain. Those were the great enemies. You always had to eat and sleep, over and over again, you had to get out of the cold, you got wet and tired or miserable. Now look at that water. It has it good: it just ripples and reflects the clouds, it's always changing and yet always stays the same too. Has no problems at all. — Nescio

The cool wind blew around us. The ocean made a complaining sound, the ocean that complains and doesn't know why. The ocean washed woefully up onto the shore. My thoughts are an ocean, they wash woefully up against their limits.
A new age would dawn, we could still do great things. I did my best to believe it, my very, very best. — Nescio

...I sit there aimlessly, God's aim is aimlessness. — Nescio

And so the little poet poetized away his never-ending poem and even the silliest woman could poetize with him. But they couldn't be together. And maybe that was what made it so beautiful. — Nescio

I'm not a poet and I'm not a nature lover and I'm not an Anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing. — Nescio