Witold Gombrowicz quotes

Witold Gombrowicz was a Polish novelist and playwright, renowned for his innovative and provocative literary style. His works explore themes of identity, form, and the absurdity of social conventions. He became one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century European literature. Here are 23 of his quotes:

Don't be fooled by your own wisdom.

Witold Gombrowicz

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

Witold Gombrowicz

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

Witold Gombrowicz

Our element is unending immaturity.

Witold Gombrowicz

I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.

Witold Gombrowicz

Beauty beheld in solitude is even more lethal.

Witold Gombrowicz

You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.

Witold Gombrowicz

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!

Witold Gombrowicz

I have never in my life needed God - from the infancy, since I was 5, I was self-sufficient.

Witold Gombrowicz

It is naive to believe that the admiration for a masterpiece is spontaneous. The admiration, to a great extent, is not born within people but between people, as if we forced each other to admire (while no one is "personally” enraptured).

Witold Gombrowicz

To me, art almost always speaks more forcefully when it appears in an imperfect, accidental, and fragmentary way, somehow just signaling its presence, allowing one to feel it through the ineptitude of the interpretation. I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.

Witold Gombrowicz

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.

Witold Gombrowicz

Foolishness is a twin sister of wisdom.

Witold Gombrowicz

The difference between western and eastern intellectuals is that the former have not been kicked in the ass enough.

Witold Gombrowicz

I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.

Witold Gombrowicz

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.

Witold Gombrowicz

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

Witold Gombrowicz

It is in the prime of youth that man sinks into empty phrases and grimaces. It's in this smithy that our maturity is forged.

Witold Gombrowicz

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

Witold Gombrowicz

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

Witold Gombrowicz