Quotes
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You have to learn to listen, and that is perhaps the hardest thing. You always speak more than one word. You can't listen enough. Also because all speech is hopeless. Even the written and recorded word is hopeless! Look around the world: what good have all those written words, advice, and persuasive experiments done? It has done nothing. What can you hope to gain by telling someone something? You can't hope for anything. Therefore, listen, always listen more and more consistently than you speak, do not try to convince others artificially, because that is impossible - truth has some educative power only if you discover it yourself - and do not try to show off that you know something. I say again, be silent. In peace and in war, be silent. And if you have spoken, rinse your mouth afterward. And when you have spoken wrongly, and are tormented with guilt, do not let that guilt go; face it, face it hard; say, "I have spoken again, and have spoken wrongly, too much, too vehemently, or too vainly; it is done, I cannot help it; but in the future I will be harder and will keep silent." Be silent, for God is silent, and he knows. Why? It is wisest to be silent.
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Every word you write, every word you utter, is written and pronounced in such a way that it can stand the test of mundane reality. Perhaps this is the secret of writing and of life. For it is useless to have a word in its place in the literary volume if it cannot withstand the atmospheric pressure of reality in the mundane volume.
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Barbarian rule is always followed by Byzantine rule. A kind of human, historical, law of the peculiar order of human nature dictates that the transition from crude invasion and conquest, from confusion to an over-refined, corrupt and contrived order, full of servile ceremonies, poison, murder and smooth talk, double-tilted, stuffy politeness and bowing cruelty. Such is man: sometimes barbarian, sometimes Byzantine. And sometimes, at very rare periods, under the educated rule of an extraordinary personality, who can reconcile the rigour of perfect law with the unwritten laws of equity, he is tamed into humanity; but these are rare and fleeting periods.
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I've noticed that it's hard to even light a fire. To light a fire in an tiled stove with ignition kindling, newspaper and dry wood shavings, which will keep alight in the cold stove, requires skill and practice. You think it's some simple and menial task that every dirty servant can do. But try it, you, with your wise and practised hands, and you will see what a difficult and delicate task it is, and how much experience and skill it requires! I can't light a tiled stove, no matter how hard I try. And how many things I can't do: for instance, play the piano, only as well and as well as a sad music clerk in a nightclub; and yet how openly and proudly I dare to talk about music! And I cannot drive a locomotive. And I cannot repair a detached button. But all this little knowledge makes up the world. Learn to respect every human movement and dexterity.
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Things are not just in themselves: they have a perspective. Therefore, never say of a phenomenon: "such or so" - only say: "from this and this perspective it looks like this."
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With my last breath, I thank fate that I was human and that a spark of reason shone in my dim soul. I saw the earth, the sky, the seasons. I have known love, the fragments of reality, desires and disappointments. I lived on the earth and slowly brightened. One day I will die: and how wonderfully right and simple that is! Could anything else, better, greater, have happened to me? It could not. I have lived the most and the greatest, the human destiny. Nothing else or better could have happened to me.
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