Witold Gombrowicz Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

A hanged sparrow! Who would ever think of hanging a sparrow? It's like flavoring borscht with two mushrooms instead of just one - it's too much! — Witold Gombrowicz

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

A brilliant liar; he has total recall. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

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 how difficult it would have been
made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have
yet I couldn't because I didn't want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy! — Witold Gombrowicz

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

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

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

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

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

Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

The individual is a nut so impossible to crack that no theoretic tooth will be able to manage it. And so nothing will be able to justify your defeat, bumblers! — Witold Gombrowicz

I am very afraid of the devil. A strange confession from the lips of an unbeliever. — Witold Gombrowicz

Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us. — Witold Gombrowicz

Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom. — Witold Gombrowicz

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. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

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

Our element is unending immaturity. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal. — Witold Gombrowicz

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. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

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

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

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

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

Man does not fear death, only the suffering. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

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

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

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

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. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

A universal style is one that knows how to embrace lovingly those not quite developed. — Witold Gombrowicz

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today. — Witold Gombrowicz

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. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost. — Witold Gombrowicz

Don't be fooled by your own wisdom — Witold Gombrowicz

I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class. — Witold Gombrowicz

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. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

There is nothing that the mature hate more, there is nothing that disgusts them more, than immaturity — Witold Gombrowicz

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

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

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

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

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

Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act. — Witold Gombrowicz

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. — Witold Gombrowicz

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

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