Quotes about World

A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and desire, for he is emitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that.

People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability of suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror, and nothing but horror.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have cirumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own I ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

But the world was too ugly, and no one decided to rise up out of the grave.

Frequent mists swirling across the countryside drifted between me and the populated land, so that the world was as it was on the fifth day of creation, when God was still undecided whether he should hand it over to Man.

That was what the dream was meant to tell Tomas, what Tereza was unable to tell himself. She had come to her, to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: she kissed them all alike, made no absolutely no distinction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He had sent her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with the other naked woman.

The horizon of love is truly boundless: it is the whole world!

This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear.

The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world.

Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world; dwell in love, and then you dwell in God.