
“Hold your tongue; you won't understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.”
Kirilov, Part III, Ch. VI, "A busy night"
The Possessed (1872)
"My Faithful Mother Tongue" (1968), trans. Czesŀaw Miŀosz and Robert Pinsky
City Without a Name (1969)
“Hold your tongue; you won't understand anything. If there is no God, then I am God.”
Kirilov, Part III, Ch. VI, "A busy night"
The Possessed (1872)
“The tongue, the Chinese say,
is like a sharp knife:
it kills
without drawing blood.”
"The Dead Heart"
The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)
Remarks at the Monogahela House (14 February 1861); as published in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953) by Roy P. Basler, vol. 4, p. 209
1860s
“For God hates utterly
The bray of bragging tongues.”
Source: Antigone, Line 123
“I am the one who has felt most deeply the stuttering of the tongue in its relation to thought.”
"Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes"
Under a Glass Bell (1944)
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Context: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead of world history, a salient difference reveals itself. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, St. Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time – that of unchaining and establishing modern bourgeois society – in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases.
Quoted by Jan Lundius, in Does WFP Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?, Inter Press Service News Agency, (December 2020)
“I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask no eye would mourn”
I Am the Only Being (1836)
Context: I am the only being whose doom
No tongue would ask no eye would mourn
I never caused a thought of gloom
A smile of joy since I was born
In secret pleasure — secret tears
This changeful life has slipped away
As friendless after eighteen years
As lone as on my natal day