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

Witold Gombrowicz

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Witold Gombrowicz
Age: 64 †
Born: 1904
Born: August 4
Died: 1969
Died: July 24
Author
Diarist
Essayist
Jurist
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Gombrowicz
Witold Gombrowicz
Valet
Lectures
Distinguished
Instead
Went
Didn

More quotes by Witold Gombrowicz

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The difference between western and eastern intellectuals is that the former have not been kicked in the ass enough.
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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.
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Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.
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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.
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Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
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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.
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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.
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Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.
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Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.
Witold Gombrowicz
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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
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Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.
Witold Gombrowicz
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Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.
Witold Gombrowicz
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I am a collection of the family's body parts.
Witold Gombrowicz
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To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.
Witold Gombrowicz
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A brilliant liar he has total recall.
Witold Gombrowicz
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Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.
Witold Gombrowicz