27 quotes
The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning — in other words, of absurdity — the more energetically meaning is sought.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
Anyone who takes himself too seriously always runs the risk of looking ridiculous; anyone who can consistently laugh at himself does not.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
The real test of a man is not how well he plays the role he has invented for himself, but how well he plays the role that destiny assigned to him.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
The cliché organizes life; it expropriates people's identity; it becomes ruler, defense lawyer, judge, and the law.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
There's always something suspicious about an intellectual on the winning side.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in "systems" cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
Sober perseverance is more effective than enthusiastic emotions, which are all too capable of being transferred, with little difficulty, to something different each day.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breathe any greatness into an action.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have — by disrupting that order — a way of surprising.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and … often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
Every concession gives rise to further concessions, we cannot back down, because behind us there is only an abyss, we must keep our promises and demand that they be kept.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)
None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events.
Disturbing the Peace (1986)