Witold Gombrowicz Quotes

Don't be fooled by your own wisdom

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.

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.

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.

Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Our element is unending immaturity.

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

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

Man does not fear death, only the suffering.

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.

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!

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

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

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

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.

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!

A brilliant liar; he has total recall.