Book: Prophets and poets. Page 2

But I would be happy only if I could bring the world to purity, the truth of inviolability.

Having snatched a person out of society, from history, from time, from space, modernism opened up his inner world, leaving his sociality, rationality, ideology and faith as unnecessary clothing. By hyperbolizing alienation, modernism compensated for the utopian messianism of the false prometheans. It was not the decline of art, but the art of human decline. Conscious decline.

I consider society not bad, that is, amenable to improvement, I consider it absurd. And this is a completely different matter ... Absurd. It’s not the lack of justice that touches me at all, but something much deeper - the inability to agree with the social organization, whatever it may be.

In every person there is a Neanderthal and Goethe, and it is not yet known who is more.

They stole a pig from a woman in the bazaar, a woman by her superiors - and they take everything from her. This would be nothing, as it is usual, but they take from her not for feeding her pig, but for the fact that she is, as it were, considered guilty. Got in the clutches, so already blame myself.

Giant wings get in your way.

He found everything she did ridiculous, and yet she was so beautiful that it made him sad.

The tragedy of civilization is its senseless activity. Only business! Only achievements! Only conquest! The root of this terrifyingly meaningless activity lies in ignorance, in the refusal to know what really needs to be done.

In the place of the spirit, we have elevated the intellect, which means that we have chosen confrontation, but not community. War and loneliness are the fruits that we naturally have to reap.

In the course of time, responsibility was blamed on thunder, on witches, on socialists, intellectuals, generals, or Jews. It is time to understand: responsibility lies with civilization itself.

Culture is not good at all - culture is manic. And manias are endless. The world is ominously supportive of injustice. You move one step forward every time you lie. Musil, like no one else, understood that true and false were the evasions of those who had already made a decision.

Whoever wants to build his relationship with a person on stone, and not on sand, should use only the lowest properties and passions, for only that which is closely related to egoism is stable and can be taken into account; higher aspirations are unreliable, contradictory and fleeting like the wind.

Among the artists who helped him discover the writer in himself, Musil put Dostoevsky in the first place.

Money is a spiritualized violence, a special, flexible, highly developed and creative form of violence.