Book detail: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book compiles a selection of aphorisms that delve into the complexities of truth and its various forms, offering readers a contemplative exploration of the human condition and the ways in which truth can be perceived and manipulated.
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“The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit; the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Psychology is as useless as directions for using poison.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Psychology is a bus that accompanies an airplane.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“If something is stolen from you, don't go to the police. They're not interested. Don't go to a psychologist either, because he's interested in only one thing: that it was really you who did the stealing.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“It is regarded as normal to consecrate virginity in general and to lust for its destruction in particular.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“It is a mystery to me how a theologian can be praised for having brought himself to disbelieve dogmas. I've always thought that those who have brought themselves to believe in dogmas merit the true recognition owing a heroic deed.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Religion, morality, and patriotism are feelings that are manifested only when they are outraged.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“If you wish to form a clear judgment on your friends, consult your dreams.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“The blind won't admit that I have eyes in my head, and the deaf say that I'm dumb.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Sorrento, August. For two weeks now I haven't heard a German word or understood an Italian one. This way one can manage to live with people; everything goes like clockwork and no irksome misunderstanding can arise.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“I master only the language of others. Mine does with me what it wants.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Who is going to cast out an error to which he has given birth and replace it with an adopted truth?”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“In a well-run mental household there ought to be a thorough cleaning at the threshold of consciousness a few times a year.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“When I read, it is not acted literature; but what I write is written acting.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“One must read all writers twice--the good as well as the bad. The one kind will be recognized; the other, unmasked.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A good stylist should have narcissistic enjoyment as he works. He must be able to objectivize his work to such an extent that he catches himself feeling envious and has to jog his memory to find that he is himself the creator. In short, he must display that highest degree of objectivity which the world calls vanity.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A good writer does not receive anywhere near the number of poison-pen letters that is commonly assumed. Among a hundred jackassesthere are not ten who will admit to being jackasses, and at most one who will put it in writing.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“In a hollow head there is much room for knowledge.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A philistine is habitually bored and looks for things that won't bore him. An artist finds things boring, but is never bored.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“There is a cultural taste which tries very hard to get rid of the lice in a fur coat. There is another which tolerates the lice and thinks the coat can be worn with them in it. And finally there is a taste which regards the lice as the most important thing about the coat and consequently places the coat at the lice's disposal.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“It is not true that one cannot live without a woman. It is simply that one cannot have lived without one.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“The extraordinary ability of a woman to forget is not the same as the talent of a lady not to be able to remember.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A poem is good until one knows by whom it is.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Most critics write critiques which are by the authors they write critiques about. That would not be so bad, but then most authorswrite works which are by the critics who write critiques about them.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Satire chooses and knows no objects. It arises by fleeing from them and their forcing themselves upon it.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A bibliophile has approximately the same relationship to literature as a philatelist to geography.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A plagiarist should be made to copy the author a hundred times.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Nothing is more horrible than my self in the mirror of hysteria. Nothing is more vulgar than my style in the hands of another. Toimitate me is to punish me.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“To be human is erroneous.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Humanity is the washerwoman of society that wrings out its dirty laundry in tears.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Humanity and bestiality: when will the former finally be uttered with the flavor of hate and the latter with the flavor of love? Does a lion tear his fellow lion to pieces?”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“I am not for women but against men.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Many women would like to dream with men without sleeping with them. Someone should point out to them that this is utterly impossible.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Children today laugh at fathers who tell them about dragons. It is necessary to make fear a required subject; otherwise children will never learn it.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“When I take up my pen, nothing can happen to me. Fate, remember that.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A man's jealousy is a social institution; a woman's prostitution is an instinct.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“What are all the orgies of Bacchus when compared to the intoxication of someone who completely surrenders to continence!”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every moment toacquire gradually an encyclopedic lack of education.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A comprehensive education is a well-stocked pharmacy: but we have no assurance that potassium cyanide will not be administered fora head cold.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“What the teachers digest, the pupils eat.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“I knew a man who carried his education in his vest pocket because there was more room there than in his head.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A school without grades must have been concocted by someone who was drunk on non-alcoholic wine.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A historian is not always a prophet facing backwards, but a journalist is always someone who afterwards knew everything beforehand.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms