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Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.
J. M. Coetzee
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J. M. Coetzee
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: January 1
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Cape Town
South Africa
John Maxwell Coetzee
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More quotes by J. M. Coetzee
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
J. M. Coetzee
Unbelief is a belief.
J. M. Coetzee
Artists no longer starve in garrets. Some people may think this is not wholly a good thing, that being an artist has become too comfortable, at least in the West. I'm not sure I agree. It's a mark of civilization to encourage the arts and the life of the mind.
J. M. Coetzee
So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart?
J. M. Coetzee
The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.
J. M. Coetzee
As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day.
J. M. Coetzee
In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.
J. M. Coetzee
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
J. M. Coetzee
Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.
J. M. Coetzee
When all else fails, philosophize.
J. M. Coetzee
I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?'
J. M. Coetzee
I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
J. M. Coetzee
Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.
J. M. Coetzee
All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy.
J. M. Coetzee
His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
J. M. Coetzee
Denunciations of the manipulativeness of advertisers can unfortunately all too easily be turned on their heads into denunciations of the gullibility of consumers. Both are forms of scapegoating, neither accomplishes anything.
J. M. Coetzee
For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.
J. M. Coetzee
My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.
J. M. Coetzee
Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.
J. M. Coetzee
Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.
J. M. Coetzee