If you have no money, you might as well assume your money is made of burdock leaves, or pancake flour, or potato tiles. There’s no money either way — so any assumption is equally valid.
…Every “no” means either “no longer” or “not yet”: “no” has both a past and a future.
“No” has a history; “yes” never does.
The most interesting things in the world are the ones that do not exist.
…The real world is no more than one among many possible worlds.
What exists — exists at the cost of what does not.
And that which does not — is always nearby, close at hand.
The boundary between them is very, very thin.
…The point is not what the world is like in itself — the point is how we imagine it.
A name never reveals the essence of a thing, never shows its meaning!
…You shouldn’t try too hard to understand everything.
Much of what you encounter here isn’t even fit to be an object of understanding.
Everything is true.
And everything is false.
Whatever you take up — you can neither prove it nor disprove it.
…You’re always searching for what does not exist — certainty.
You cling to your individuality as if you actually had one.
In court they talk about truth.
Only truth, nothing but the truth — but nowhere else do they act this way.
And even in court, by “truth” they mean fidelity to fact — yet between fact and truth there lies No Man’s Land…
No, you leave me alone and grant me the right not to have a definite size —
if only because, as it turns out, no one else does either!
Words must not be used in absolute meanings:
nothing in a world where everything is relative corresponds to anything absolute.
There is no large or small, no forward or backward direction, no right side or left, no up or down!
There is no tomorrow, no yesterday either!
There is nothing.
Breathe freely, at last!
By the way, much of what happens doesn’t need your constant judgment.
Your judgments change nothing: the world exists independently of them.
Nothing should become habitual:
what becomes habitual becomes ordinary — and ceases to be noticed.
You could end up overlooking everything in the world, for there is nothing that does not eventually become familiar.
You walk into the world with an idea in your head about how things ought to be.
And what do you actually know about it?
Just this:
an apple tree is an apple tree, a linden is a linden, big is not small, small is not big.
Not much, really…
And life sneaks up — and snaps you on the nose!
…Death is by no means always non-life, just as life is not always non-death.
There is death that is life, and life that is death.
All the real thrill lies in staying at the border —
when you can see both sides at once: two countries, two ideas —
and yet in your mind there is a single image: the image of the border itself.
Never cling to what is obvious to everyone.
There’s no joy in repeating what is universally understood.
What’s interesting isn’t what everyone grasps — it’s what only you grasp.
You, most likely, don’t know how to see essences —
you only see two halves.
A word by itself points to nothing definite.
It’s only people who attach words to whatever they please.
The Big Meaning, the Main Meaning is always very far away.
Common Sense is always very close.
However it may be, you still have no right to take my Sea of Azov out of my system of representations, shove it into yours — and then understand it there.
As if speaking were simple!
I myself don’t always understand why people dare to speak so boldly: sometimes you might imply something you yourself neither said nor meant!
…Language is a delicate thing — though few people know this: just a handful of good poets.
It doesn’t matter where you go: no choice will ever be the “right” one.
We think: tomorrow something will happen that has never happened before —
at least not the day before yesterday, not yesterday, and certainly not today!
And when we grow tired of waiting, we turn to literature —
and live out in it the very lives we never knew and never will.
Most people simply carry out the will of language, subjected to its dictatorship —
using without thinking whatever words language tosses their way.
Few are capable of transformations.
A word has no exact meaning:
for language too is only the Echo of the World.
…Words are useless out of context: they lose their meaning.
Imagination is free —
it’s a golden butterfly living for a single day, a single instant:
a flap of wings — and goodbye!
It’s already another; it has already changed…
I don’t use words in rigid meanings.
First of all, words themselves don’t much like rigid meanings.
And second — it’s too binding.