The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.
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He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.
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The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.
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Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.
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The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.
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Nothing is poorer than a truth expressed as it was thought. Committed to writing in such cases, it is not even a bad photograph. Truth wants to be startled abruptly, at one stroke, from her self-immersion, whether by uproar, music or cries for help.
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The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.
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Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.
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Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.
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Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.
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Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.
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Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.
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These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
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The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.
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Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
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Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.
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Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.
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Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.
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The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public....
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The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
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To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
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The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.
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