
“One must speak about serious things seriously.”
Letter to A.N. Pleshcheev (September 9, 1888)
Letters
Source: P.S. I Love You
“One must speak about serious things seriously.”
Letter to A.N. Pleshcheev (September 9, 1888)
Letters
Bk. 2, Ch. 11
Quoted, Tender is the Night (1934)
Context: One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
Pierre Fauchery, as quoted by the character "Jules Labarthe"
The Age for Love
Context: I had a friend, a companion of my own age, who, when he was twenty, had loved a young girl. He was poor, she was rich. Her family separated them. The girl married some one else and almost immediately afterward she died. My friend lived. Some day you will know for yourself that it is almost as true to say that one recovers from all things as that there is nothing which does not leave its scar. I had been the confidant of his serious passion, and I became the confidant of the various affairs that followed that first ineffaceable disappointment. He felt, he inspired, other loves. He tasted other joys. He endured other sorrows, and yet when we were alone and when we touched upon those confidences that come from the heart's depths, the girl who was the ideal of his twentieth year reappeared in his words. How many times he has said to me, "In others I have always looked for her and as I have never found her, I have never truly loved any one but her."
“Translated: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
7
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Also: About what one can not speak, one must remain silent. (7)
Source: 1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
“If one speaks about torture, one must take care not to exaggerate.”
At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966)