Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet:
Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe…
-
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel:
The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think." That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless.
-
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller:
The gift of listening is being lost, and the community of listeners is disappearing.
-
Osip Mandelstam, ‘The 19th century’:
….our own century has begun under the sign of a sublime intolerance, exclusively, and the conscious noncomprehension of other worlds.
-
Georg Lukacs, Preface to The Theory of Novel:
Thus, if anyone today reads The Theory of the Novel in order to become more intimately acquainted with the prehistory of the important ideologies of the 1920s and 1930s, he will derive profit from a critical reading of the book along the lines I have suggested. But if he picks up the book in the hope that it will serve him as a guide, the result will only be a still greater disorientation. As a young writer, Arnold Zweig read The Theory of the Novel hoping that it would help him to find his way; his healthy instinct led him, rightly, to reject it root and branch.
-
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols:
For once and for all, I want not to know many things. - Wisdom sets limits on knowledge too.
-
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities:
it’s like looking out over a wide shimmering sheet of water—so bright it seems like darkness to the eye, and on the far bank things don’t seem to be standing on solid ground but float in the air with a delicately exaggerated distinctness that’s almost painful and hallucinatory. The impression one gets is as much of intensification as of loss. One feels linked with everything but can’t get close to anything. You stand here, and the world stands there, overly subjective and overly objective, but both almost painfully clear, and what separates and unites these normally fused elements is a blazing darkness, an overflowing and extinction, a swinging in and out.
The Ox and His Herdsman, 十牛図〈八〉人牛倶忘 :
With one blow the vast sky suddenly breaks into pieces.
Holy, worldly, both vanished without a trace.