Quotes from Witold Gombrowicz

An idea abstracted from man does not fully exist…. There is no word that is not also flesh.

Spirit is born of the imitation of spirit and a writer must pretend to be a writer in order finally to become a writer.

Do you want to know who you are Don't ask. Act Action will delineate and define you.

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.

Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.

Don't be fooled by your own wisdom

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.

Great! I've written something stupid, but I haven't signed a contract with anyone to produce solely wise and perfect works. I gave vent to my stupidity...and here I am, reborn.

Rzecz prosta, im m?drzejszy czytelnik, tym i ksi??ka oka?e si? m?drzejsza; im za? czytelnik g?upszy i bardziej ja?owy, tym i ksi??ka b?dzie g?upsza.

We say 'forest' but this word is made of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unencompassed. The earth. Clods of dirt. Pebbles. On a clear day you rest among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, grass, bushes, a dog (or a cat), a chair, but that changes when you realize that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm.

I placed no trust in faiths, doctrines, ideologies, institutions. Thus I could stand only upon my own feet. But I was a Pole, molded by Polishness, living in Poland. And so I needed to look deeper for my 'self,' in the place where it was no longer Polish but simply human

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.

Wielka Poezja b?d?c wielk? i b?d?c poezj? nie mo?e nie zachwyca? nas, a wi?c zachwyca!

Our element is unending immaturity.

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.

Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.

Not surprisingly, because too much attention to one object leads to distraction, this one object conceals everything else, and when we focus on one point on the map we know that all other points are eluding us.

I became bold because I had absolutely nothing to lose: neither honors, nor earnings, nor friends. I had to find myself anew and rely only on myself, because I could rely on no one else. My form is my solitude.

You, oh mature ones, keep company solely with other mature ones, and your maturity is so mature that it can only chum up with maturity!

I am a collection of the family's body parts.

Isn't it true (I thought), that one is almost never present, or rather never fully present, and that's because we have only a halfhearted, chaotic and slipshod, disgraceful and vile relationship with out surroundings.

Joey, it's high time, dear child. What will people say? If you don't want to be a doctor, at least be a womanizer, or a fancier of horses, be something... be something definite...

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today.

I could have protested of course, who says I couldn't--I could have risen to my feet at any moment, walked up to them, and--no matter how difficult it would have been--made it abundantly clear that I was not seventeen but thirty. I could have--yet I couldn't because I didn't want to, the only thing I wanted was to prove that I was not an old-fashioned boy!