Top 61 Imre Quotes
#1. I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#2. If I find out that Whin has been sedated or restrained I'll ride you naked through the streets of Imre like a little pink pony.
Patrick Rothfuss
#3. Because Imre offered what every artist needs most - an appreciative, affluent audience.
Patrick Rothfuss
#4. I am sick of atrocities, though these are now the natural order of our world. And I would still like to act!
Imre Kertesz
#5. I will create what I am meant
to create.
But I will not destroy what I am meant
to destroy.
Nay, I will stare destruction in the eye
and say,
"I will create you again.
Beata N. Imre
#6. The West in general should stand up more for its own values. It is not always worthwhile to compromise.
Imre Kertesz
#7. The positive heuristic of the programme saves the scientist from becoming confused by the ocean of anomalies.
Imre Lakatos
#8. A good autobiography is like a document: a mirror of the age on which people can 'depend.' In a novel, by contrast, it's not the facts that matter, but precisely what you add to the facts.
Imre Kertesz
#9. It would be wrong to assume that one must stay with a research programme until it has exhausted all its heuristic power, that one must not introduce a rival programme before everybody agrees that the point of degeneration has probably been reached.
Imre Lakatos
#10. In degenerating programmes, however, theories are fabricated only in order to accommodate known facts
Imre Lakatos
#11. I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.
Imre Kertesz
#12. I would like to live a little bit longer in this beautiful concentration camp.
Imre Kertesz
#13. Intellectual honesty consists in stating the precise conditions under which one will give up one's belief.
Imre Lakatos
#14. I can see the young man on dizzily autumn mornings, the fog of which he inhaled just like the rapidly evaporating freedom.
Imre Kertesz
#15. One cannot start a new life, you can only continue the old one.
Imre Kertesz
#16. Mathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation and criticism, by the logic of proofs and refutations.
Imre Lakatos
#17. Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
Imre Kertesz
#18. The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.
Imre Kertesz
#19. Kurti had believed in politics, and politics had deceived him, the way politics deceives everyone.
Imre Kertesz
#20. No" - I could never be another person's father, fate, god,
"No" - it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz).
Imre Kertesz
#21. The proving power of the intellect or the senses was questioned by the skeptics more than two thousand years ago; but they were browbeaten into confusion by the glory of Newtonian physics.
Imre Lakatos
#22. The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.
Imre Lakatos
#23. Belief may be a regrettably unavoidable biological weakness to be kept under the control of criticism: but commitment is for Popper an outright crime.
Imre Lakatos
#24. There's just one revolution that I can take seriously, and that's a police revolution.
Imre Kertesz
#25. I read somewhere; while God still existed one sustained a dialogue with God, and now that He no longer exists one has to sustain a dialogue with other people, I guess, or, better still, with oneself, that is to say, one talks or mumbles to oneself.
Imre Kertesz
#26. In a democracy, you have to find a market niche, make sure a novel is 'interesting' and 'spectacular.' That may be the toughest censorship of all.
Imre Kertesz
#27. What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.
Imre Kertesz
#28. I was interned in Auschwitz for one year. I didn't bring back anything, except for a few jokes, and that filled me with shame. Then again, I didn't know what to do with this fresh experience. For this experience was no literary awakening, no occasion for professional or artistic introspection.
Imre Kertesz
#29. One may rationally stick to a degenerating research programme until it is overtaken by a rival and even after. What one must not do is to deny its poor public record ... It is perfectly rational to play a risky game: what is irrational is to deceive oneself about the risk.
Imre Lakatos
#30. Man's respect for knowledge is one of his most peculiar characteristics. Knowledge in Latin is scientia, and science came to be the name of the most respectable kind of knowledge.
Imre Lakatos
#31. When we write about Auschwitz, we must know that Auschwitz, in a certain sense at least, suspended literature. One can only write a black novel about Auschwitz or - you should excuse the expression - a cheap serial, which begins in Auschwitz and is still not over.
Imre Kertesz
#32. Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate.
Imre Kertesz
#33. Modern life is organised so that you benefit at the expense of the other, and the most extreme example of that is a camp.
Imre Kertesz
#34. You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.
Imre Kertesz
#35. That sometimes clear ... and sometimes vague stuff ... which is ... mathematics.
Imre Lakatos
#36. If there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate.
Imre Kertesz
#37. Talking is not enough; words don't clarify anything. I'll have to hit upon something, but what?
Imre Kertesz
#38. I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.
Imre Kertesz
#39. It was not very likely, of course, but then all kinds of things are possible, after all.
Imre Kertesz
#40. Of course, living is another way of killing oneself: its drawback is that it takes so horribly long.
Imre Kertesz
#41. Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
Imre Lakatos
#42. Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
Imre Lakatos
#43. The history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, [is] blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the history of mathematics, is empty.
Imre Lakatos
#44. Research programmes, besides their negative heuristic, are also characterized by their positive heuristic.
Imre Lakatos
#45. I came from two harsh dictatorships, Nazi and Stalinist. I never thought of becoming a writer as such, yet in a lucid moment, I recognised what I had to do.
Imre Kertesz
#46. If even in science there is no a way of judging a theory but by assessing the number, faith and vocal energy of its supporters, then this must be even more so in the social sciences: truth lies in power.
Imre Lakatos
#47. Nonexistence. The society of the nonexistent. In the street yesterday a nonexistent person trod on my foot with his nonexistent foot.
Imre Kertesz
#48. No experimental result can ever kill a theory: any theory can be saved from counterinstances either by some auxiliary hypothesis or by a suitable reinterpretation of its terms.
Imre Lakatos
#49. Let me see no more of my harsh fate: this useless struggle.
Imre Madach
#50. The clash between Popper and Kuhn is not about a mere technical point in epistemology.
Imre Lakatos
#51. Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.
Imre Lakatos
#52. There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.
Imre Lakatos
#53. Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.
Imre Lakatos
#55. It is not that we propose a theory and Nature may shout NO; rather, we propose a maze of theories, and Nature may shout INCONSISTENT.
Imre Lakatos
#56. I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that's just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.
Imre Kertesz
#57. It is often said of me - some intend it as a compliment, others as a complaint - that I write about a single subject: the Holocaust. I have no quarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain qualifications, the place assigned to me on the shelves of libraries?
Imre Kertesz
#58. A book is either autobiography or a novel.
Imre Kertesz
#59. Indeed, this epistemological theory of the relation between theory and experiment differs sharply from the epistemological theory of naive falsificationism.
Imre Lakatos
#60. I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts.
Imre Kertesz
#61. Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.
A person's true means of expression is his life. Living the shame of life and maintaining silence, that was the greatest accomplishment of all.
Imre Kertesz
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