Best 34 quotes of Witold Gombrowicz on MyQuotes

A brilliant liar; he has total recall.

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

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

Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras. You've no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it's incredible how one grows.

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

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.

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!

Czy więc nic nigdy nie może zostać naprawdę wyrażone, oddane w swoim stawaniu się anonimowym, nikt nigdy nie zdoła oddać bełkotu rodzącej się chwili, jak to jest, że, urodzeni z chaosu nie możemy nigdy z nim się zetknąć, zaledwie spojrzymy, a już pod naszym spojrzeniem rodzi się porządek... i kształt...

Dzieje kultury wykazują, ze głupota jest siostrą bliźniaczą rozumu, ona rośnie najbujniej nie na glebie dziewiczej ignorancji , lecz na gruncie uprawnym siódmym potem doktorów i profesorów. Wielkie absurdy nie są wymyślane przez tych, których rozum krząta się wokół spraw codziennych. Nic dziwnego zatem, że właśnie najintensywniejsi myśliciele bywali producentami największego głupstwa. / 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)

Gdy w domu sąsiadów pokazują wam z nabożeństwem sygnet prapradziadka, wolno pomyśleć, że teraźniejszość tej rodziny musi być pod zdechłym Azorem, skoro przeszłość tak jej imponuje.

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.

Ileż zdań można utworzyć z dwudziestu czterech liter alfabetu? Ileż znaczeń można wyprowadzić z setek chwastów, grudek i innych drobiazgów?

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.

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.

Mnie Bóg, w życiu moim, nigdy nie był potrzebny - od najwcześniejszego dzieciństwa, ani przez pięć minut - byłem 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)

Nagość, phoszę państwa, jest demagogiczna, jest wphost socjalistyczna, bo i cóż by było, gdyby gmin odkhył, że nasza dupa taka sama?!

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