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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“Many desire to kill me, and many wish to spend an hour chatting with me. The law protects me from the former.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“To me it's still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“That an author takes a bow is not humility but presumption. What does the paleface want on the stage afterwards? But before the performance he had even less business there--and paying him royalties is equivalent to cheating the actors.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Prussia: freedom of movement with a muzzle. Austria: an isolation cell in which screaming is allowed.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“How unreliable is the woman caught being faithful! Today she is faithful to you, tomorrow to another.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“It so often happened to me that someone who shared my opinion kept the larger share for himself that I am now forewarned and offer people only ideas.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Through my satire I make little people so big that afterwards they are worthy objects of my satire and no one can reproach me any longer.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Jealousy is a dog's bark which attracts thieves.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“You'd be surprised how hard it can often be to translate an action into an idea.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Experiences are savings which a miser puts aside. Wisdom is an inheritance which a wastrel cannot exhaust.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“I don't like to meddle in my private affairs.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A fine world in which man reproaches woman with fulfilling his heart's desire!”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“I and life: The case was settled chivalrously. The opponents parted without having made up.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Sex education is legitimate in that girls cannot be taught soon enough how children don't come into the world.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“You don't even live once.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A weak man has doubts before a decision; a strong man has them afterwards.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“War is, at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn't believe what a racket they make in my room.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“There are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A woman occasionally is quite a serviceable substitute for masturbation.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Truth is a clumsy servant that breaks the dishes while washing them.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Artists have a right to be modest and a duty to be vain.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Moral responsibility is what is lacking in a man when he demands it of a woman.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“In case of doubt, decide in favor of what is correct.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“One can translate an editorial but not a poem. For one can go across the border naked but not without one's skin; for, unlike clothes, one cannot get a new skin.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A man's eroticism is a woman's sexuality.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms