“In London November isn't a month, it's a state of mind.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“And while there is life there is always the chance that something might happen...”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“Everyone has to find his own way to die.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“You start off as Mr X, who happens to be an engineer, and sooner or later you're just an engineer who happens to be called Mr X.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“For love, there has to be a distance across which lovers can approach one another. The approach is of course just an illusion, because love in fact separates people. Love is a polarity.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“Because, my dear, in the spiritual life opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing. That's why the church won't allow eunuchs to become priests.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“I really dislike the sort of people who aren't like other people. It's true other people are so boring. But so are the ones who aren't like them.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“I really detest those people who like to draw practical conclusions from scholarly truths, who 'apply learning to real life', like engineers who turn to propositions of chemistry into insecticides for bedbugs. It translates, in Goethe's words, as: 'life is grey, but the golden tree of theory is always green'.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“The matter could in fact have been resolved quite simply if all those round the table had been equally intelligent. But in this life that is rarely given.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, he had sensed this meaning everywhere, in the streets, houses, ruins and temples of Rome. It could not be said of the feeling that it was 'filled with pleasurable expectation'. Rome and its millennia were not by nature associated with happiness, and what Mihály anticipated from the future was not what is usually conjured up by 'pleasurable expectation'. He was awaiting his fate, the logical, appropriately Roman, ending.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“The nature of civilisation everywhere was such that, even with the Greeks, it diverted people’s minds away from the reality of death.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
“as long as we keep moving, we don’t notice how tired we are, but only when we sit down.”
― Antal Szerb, quote from Journey by Moonlight
Antal Szerb
Born place: in Budapest, Hungary
Born date May 1, 1901
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“They say the day the Governor arrived, the ravens did too.”
― Kiran Millwood Hargrave, quote from The Girl of Ink and Stars
“you rise at dawn in May you can savour the world before the pandemonium din of the Industrial Revolution and 24/7 shopping.”
― John Lewis-Stempel, quote from Meadowland: the private life of an English field
“More energy is needed to rise a millimetre above a neutron star's surface than to break completely free of Earth's gravity. A pen dropped from a height of one metre would impact with the energy of a ton of TNT (although the intense gravity on a neutron star's surface would actually, of course, squash any such objects instantly). A projectile would need to attain half the speed of light to escape its gravity; conversely, anything that fell freely onto a neutron star from a great height would impact at more than half the speed of light.”
― Martin J. Rees, quote from Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe
“A hole is defined by its edges, and these are not part of the hole. So a hole can exist only if there is something that is not a hole.”
― Mark Rowlands, quote from The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death, and Happiness
“because that’s what you do, you keep trying even when you know the effort is in vain. As”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from The Passenger
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