J. M. Coetzee Quotes

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

When all else fails, philosophize.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.

Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.

It is a world of words that creates a world of things.

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

Anyone who says that life matters less to an animal than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh...I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.

Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.

Reason is simply a vast tautology.

Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.

Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.

Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don't see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.

The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.

Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.

I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

Long visits don't make for good friends.

I am not the we of anyone