Bolesław Prus

Bolesław Prus was the pen-name of Aleksander Głowacki (August 20, 1847 – May 19, 1912), a Polish journalist and novelist known as the leading representative of realism in 19th-century Polish literature.

Quotes

Bolesław Prus (Aleksander Głowacki), circa 1895

• Folly is as great as the sea, it will compass anything.
  • Pharaoh (1894–1895)

• A life whose beginning we do not remember, and whose end we do not know.
  • The Doll (1887–1889)

• And is there no war on today? It is the weapons that have changed, that's all. Instead of an axe or scythe or scimitar, they fight with roubles.
  • The Doll

• For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others.
  • The Doll

• In all of nature, a male belongs to a female that he fancies and who fancies him. And so among the animals there are no idiots. But with us!... I'm a Jew, so I musn't love a Christian woman... He's a merchant, so he's got no right to a countess... And you who've got no money, you've no rights to any woman at all...
  • The Doll

• Money really is a great power, only one must know how to use it.
  • The Doll

• Pity is an emotion equally unpleasant to the bestower as to the recipient.
  • The Doll

• There are neither graves nor death in Nature; there are various forms of existence, some of which enable us to be chemists, others only chemical substances.
  • The Doll

• ‘There are two men in me,’ he thought, ‘one quite sensible, the other a lunatic. But I am not concerned with that any longer... What shall I do, though, if the sensible man wins?’
  • The Doll

• Your true Pole starts to sweat at the second decimal place, at the fifth he runs a temperature, and at the seventh has a stroke...
  • The Doll

• Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine [... He] has too many dogmas to [...] easily [...] believe in a new truth [...]; too many sympathies and antipathies [...] for him to come to love something unfamiliar; [...] too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion [...].
  • "Oda do młodości" ["Ode to Youth"], 1905