Quotes by Hungarian Authors - Page 3

It might be true that it is “quality time” that counts, but after a certain point quantity has a bearing on quality.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Nothing woke up a man as quickly in the morning as a scorpion in his pants.
Dana Marton
In his 1907 retirement address, Joseph Pulitzer urged his successors to always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.
Joseph Pulitzer
Leaving the path to follow the heart, to help someone, is anything... but reckless.
Adam Scythe
The stupid neither forgive nor forget the naive forgive and forget the wise forgive but do not forget.
Thomas Szasz
I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures. And perhaps the only thing in life one can do is to take the givens of one’s fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can. That is the most we can accomplish.
Sándor Márai
All of us are in desperate need of the restoration of our wholeness through union with our inmost self.
Stephan A. Hoeller
First you must face your own reality in the present, here and now! If you fail to do that, if you do not obtain first-hand experience from it, there will be no deep, far-reaching changes in you.
Frank Wanderer
The Wanderer in every moment spent awake faces two alternatives: a choice is to be made between the ambitions stretching between past and future, or the quiet, simplicity, purity and emptiness, full of vibrating life, of the present. It is, however, only the latter that brings to the life of the Wanderer the Witnessing Presence!
Frank Wanderer
I’d love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn’t bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree’s.
Gyula Krúdy
...By the time I would finish school I'll be fifty? He smiled."You're going to be fifty anyhow
Edith Eva Eger
When I was in Auschwitz, I kept asking, why am I here, what did I do wrong? What did my grandfather do wrong? And a young American man, he put me in the right knowledge. You didn’t do anything wrong, he said, the world did something wrong, terribly wrong. This young man, he went to Budapest in the beginning of it all, and he saved Jews, he gave out passports of Sweden, and because the Hungarians didn’t know how to read Swedish, this was how my father was saved. And thousands of others too, with these pieces of paper. I am here to tell you that one man can make a difference, and that man can be you, any of you…
Alice Lok Cahana
[Mathematics] is security. Certainty. Truth. Beauty. Insight. Structure. Architecture. I see mathematics, the part of human knowledge that I call mathematics, as one thing—one great, glorious thing. Whether it is differential topology, or functional analysis, or homological algebra, it is all one thing. ... They are intimately interconnected, they are all facets of the same thing. That interconnection, that architecture, is secure truth and is beauty. That's what mathematics is to me.
Paul R. Halmos
A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result has been the aggrandizement of psychiatry. The value to the legal profession and to society as a whole of psychiatric help in administering the criminal law, is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps society has been injured, rather than helped, by the furor psychodiagnosticus and psychotherapeuticus in criminology which it invited, fostered, and tolerated.
Thomas Szasz
Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom.
Arthur Koestler
I lied to you,’ she said, hanging her head in shame, ‘more than once. In fact, I swore that my lies were truth. I can’t understand how it could have happened. It just came out of my mouth and by the time I realised what I'd done, it was too late. ‘It’s never too late to realise that you were mistaken, Sophiel.
A.O. Esther
...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
Arthur Koestler
Even fairly good students, when they have obtained the solution of the problem and written down neatly the argument, shut their books and look for something else. Doing so, they miss an important and instructive phase of the work. ... A good teacher should understand and impress on his students the view that no problem whatever is completely exhausted.
George Pólya
I know have lived, so many times, that the only thing I have left to remember is my writing, cause every single moment in life it's already written.
Piroska Rodriguez
(Life) it was a little bit nearer than God, but no less powerful and terrible. Yes, it was something, perhaps, that one did not wish to understand because one feared it, something to which one paid tribute lest it should feel offended and seize one, body and soul.
Arthur Holitscher
In a way, mathematics is the only infinite human activity. It is conceivable that humanity could eventually learn everything in physics or biology. But humanity certainly won't ever be able to find out everything in mathematics, because the subject is infinite. Numbers themselves are infinite. That's why mathematics is really my only interest.
Paul Erdős
Presidents and other politicians manage the appearance of things, largely by manipulating the air and hope.
George Friedman
You would like to read, but somehow the rain gets into the book, too; not literally, and yet it really does, the letters are meaningless, and all you hear is the rain.
Sándor Márai
Zoltán looked at them through the window. He hated the man. Now he hated work. Work for these? Work with these? He saw before him the great puszta. Here the long, cracked stripe of a ditch once again stole the blue of the sky, transforming it into a deeper colour, renewing it, like an artist's palette: every pool on the meadows, every clump of flowers, was a jewel on the bosom of nature, a diadem, a string of pearls: oh, nature was lovely... That is, it would be if it could... But mankind... Among these? Struggle, fight, this greedy little piece of meat... Dark furrows on the wondrous surface, the many-branched, tufted promise of the maize, jewelled patches on God's regal robe: why was the world so lovely? to cover up the ugliness of man?
Zsigmond Móricz
She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable.
Sándor Márai
Now we live in fairyland. The only lightly disappointing thing about this land is that it is smaller than the real world has ever been.
Frigyes Karinthy
Thousands of years ago--in times we are fond of calling "primitive" (since this renders us "modern" without having to exert ourselves further to earn this qualification)...
Thomas Szasz
The idea that the president has the power to craft a new strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of reality crafted by those who came before him. We are all trapped in circumstances into which we were born and choices that were made for us.
George Friedman
Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations.
Arthur Koestler
After curiosity, this quality of concentrated attention is what creative individuals mention most often as having set them apart in college from their peers. Without this quality, they could not have sustained the hard work, the ‘perspiration.’ Curiosity and drive are in many ways the yin and the yang that need to be combined in order to achieve something new.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation from others, and thus affords them the possibility of dignity. They loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, and thus confronts them with the possibility of insignificance.
Thomas Szasz
The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.
Arthur Koestler
People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something one finds, it is something one creates.
Thomas Szasz
... on the historical scale, the damages wrought by individual violence for selfish motives are insignificant compared to the holocausts resulting from self-transcending devotion to collectively shared belief-systems. It is derived from primitive identification instead of mature social integration; it entails the partial surrender of personal responsibility and produces the quasi-hypnotic phenomena of group-psychology.
Arthur Koestler
The reality is that every single person is individual and special. There has never been and will never be another person on the Earth like you!
Frank Wanderer
Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.
Edward Teller
Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary, as if tenderized by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flash of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.
Dezső Kosztolányi
It’s never too late to drop your beliefs and let your wounds heal. Instead of wounding others as well.
Adam Scythe
By the time I had complete my 22nd year, I was a new man - an atheist.
Béla Bartók
Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.
Theodora Goss
A man's character is only formed after the impressions of childhood and early youth have become blended with the indefinable and hidden influences both atavistic and of more immediate heredity. When, like soft clay, the newborn human spirit has been first fashioned by the firm hand of the modeller and then allowed to set and harden, this is the moment of the final character emerges, fixed for life. While the part played by heredity will always remains elusive and uncertain, the influence of a man's early years are not difficult to unfurl if we know where to seek and consider seriously what we find.
Miklós Bánffy
No, I have no desire to be a feminist, I just want to be a female,
Gyula Krúdy
I opened the window to let some fresh air into the room and was surprised to see that the rain was not just falling, but that it formed an actual wall of water, as if the whole sky were falling. While I was staring at the strange phenomenon, the form of an angel began to appear before me… It was Matariel, the Angel of Rain, whom I had not seen since my descent and who on this occasion appeared in a shiny, blue-grey form. She was only an arm’s length away and stared straight at me. She looked like a young woman floating on enormous wings -not a single drop of rain touched her. The smell of the cool rain swept the room as Matariel began talking to me. She never once moved her lips, but her every word was clearly audible in my head.
A.O. Esther
Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.
Albert Szent-Györgyi
I have to tell you about these things from the past, because they are so important. The really important things usually lie in the distant past. And until you know about them, if you'll forgive my saying so, you will always to some extent a mere newcomer in my life.When I was at High School my favourite pastime was walking. Or rather, loitering. If we are talking about my adolescence, it's the more accurate word. Systematically, one by one, I explored all the districts of Pest. I relished the special atmosphere of every quarter and every street. Even now I can still find the same delight in houses that I did then. In this respect I've never grown up. Houses have so much to say to me. For me, they are what Nature used to be to the poets - or rather, what the poets thought of as Nature.But best of all I loved the Castle Hill District of Buda. I never tired of its ancient streets. Even in those days old things attracted me more than new ones. For me the deepest truth was found only in things suffused with the lives of many generations, which hold the past as permanently as mason Kelemen's wife buried in the high tower of Deva.
Antal Szerb
Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions”?
Thomas Szasz
It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.
John von Neumann
Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth.
Albert-László Barabási
Have you found your Christmas spirit yet? he asked as they drove by Broslin Square.tThe decorations were out of control. "This place would make Liberace feel underdressed.
Dana Marton
Anonymity crowned him as if t'were the halo of romantic glory.
Emmuska Orczy
It was the merit of Gestalt psychology to make us aware of the remarkable performance involved in perceiving shapes. Take, for example, a ball or an egg: we can see their shapes at a glance. Yet suppose that instead of the impression made on our eye by an aggregate of white points forming the surface of an egg, we were presented with another, logically equivalent, presentation of these points as given by a list of their spatial co-ordinate values. It would take years of labour to discover the shape inherent in this aggregate of figures - provided it could be guessed at all. The perception of the egg from the list of co-ordinate values would, in fact, be a feat rather similar in nature and measure of intellectual achievement to the discovery of the Copernican system.
Michael Polanyi
I set free the phantoms of my imagination.
Frigyes Karinthy
This time, I sat next to a pixie girl called Takara, who had pinkish hair and wore a bright pink dress to match. She was the first forest-dweller I had seen wearing jewellery: she was wearing a necklace and bracelet of finely worked crystal beads. When she noticed my interest, she removed her bracelet and held it out to me. “Sophiel, I would be so pleased if you would wear this!”I was surprised by this kind and very selfless gesture; after all, I had not been admiring her jewels with any intention of asking her to part with them!“You’re very kind, Takara, but I was merely admiring your handiwork!” I said, trying politely to refuse her gift. “Mitsuko told me that you make your jewellery yourself. You’re very talented, they’re really lovely pieces, but I wouldn’t want to take them away from you. It’s you that makes these jewels really beautiful!
A.O. Esther
How are you? My father could say this quicker than anybody. He was always the first to say how are you, provided the occasion called for it, and he saw his chance. Thanks to this skill, he was made ambassador to England ...
Péter Esterházy
Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbes and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.
Brassaï
If the US is a human melting pot, then Eastern Europe is a scrap yard.
Péter Zilahy
If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic
Thomas Szaz
I must fling myself down and writhe; I must strive with every piece of force I possess; I bruise and batter myself against the floor, the walls; I strain and sob and exhaust myself, and begin again, and exhaust myself again; but do I feel pain? Never. How can I feel pain? There is no place for it.
Harry Houdini
Reaching beyond ourselves, exceeding our mind is not a simple thing. It is, in fact, impossible–one half of the Ego is trying to exceed the other.
Frank Wanderer
Learn as much as you can. Take every opportunity to learn about writing, whether it’s through classes, workshops, whatever is available to you. This may be difficult, because things like classes, workshops, writing programs, require time and money. But I say this honestly and somewhat harshly – if you’re not willing to prioritize your writing, perhaps you should do something else?
Theodora Goss