Antal Szerb Quotes

#1. If someone wants to give you money, whatever the source, you should take it. Every religious-historical authority agrees about that.

Antal Szerb

#2. If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn't be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois.

Antal Szerb

#3. Also when it is a case of only upholding some spiritual tenet, such as infant baptism, original sin, and unnecessary separation, then ... we conclude that ... the stubborn sectaries must be put to death.

Martin Luther

#4. Love preserves one moment for ever, the moment of its birth. The beloved never ages.

Antal Szerb

#5. It is not the business of a Queen to be human.

Antal Szerb

#6. 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

#7. In London November isn't a month, it's a state of mind.

Antal Szerb

#8. That's the nature of grief: It's a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support.

Yann Martel

#9. And while there is life there is always the chance that something might happen ...

Antal Szerb

#10. Nothing is more frightening than the completely inexplicable.

Antal Szerb

#11. The light died on the window-sill as the last survivor of a charge dies on the enemy parapet, murdered but glorious.

Josephine Tey

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The history of modern philosophy is the history of losing and regaining the awareness of the fact that there is no third way between the Absolute and the absurd.

Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

#15. We carry within ourselves the direction our lives will take. Within ourselves burn the timeless, fateful stars.

Antal Szerb

#16. The French by their nature had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored.

Antal Szerb

#17. Everyone has to find his own way to die.

Antal Szerb

#18. Who can say I have a bad swing? The only thing that matters in golf is the score you put on the board. You don't have to look pretty out there, you have to win. Look at my record and tell me who has a better swing than mine.

Lee Trevino

#19. The sense of impending disaster hung over the garden like a chandelier.

Antal Szerb

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. The stronger civilization becomes, the more deeply the love of death is buried in the subconscious.

Antal Szerb