He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.

J. M. Coetzee

Categorized in : Home Doe Humility

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.

J. M. Coetzee

generosity guilt simple

Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.

J. M. Coetzee

imagine imagination

Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them.

J. M. Coetzee

holocaust self rabbits

When all else fails, philosophize.

J. M. Coetzee

when-all-else-fails failing

Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.

J. M. Coetzee

crafts deception use

Children all over the world consort quite naturally with animals. They don't see any dividing line. That is something they have to be taught, just as they have to be taught it is all right to kill and eat them.

J. M. Coetzee

pet animal children

The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to think analogically.

J. M. Coetzee

type connections thinking

Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.

J. M. Coetzee

beloved light love-is

Anyone who says that life matters less to an animal than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve. When you say that the fight lacks a dimension of intellectual or imaginative horror, I agree. It is not the mode of being animals to have an intellectual horror: their whole being is in the living flesh...I urge you to walk, flank to flank, beside the beast that is prodded down the chute to his executioner.

J. M. Coetzee

fighting animal hands

Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run.

J. M. Coetzee

energy running ideas

Long visits don't make for good friends.

J. M. Coetzee

good-friend long

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

J. M. Coetzee

blindness certain ignorance

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

J. M. Coetzee

frozen sea book

I am not the we of anyone

J. M. Coetzee

Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.

J. M. Coetzee

difficulty difficult people

All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.

J. M. Coetzee

justice memories world

Because a women's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it.

J. M. Coetzee

womens-beauty doe world

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?

J. M. Coetzee

growing-up passion soul

The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

J. M. Coetzee

lexicon different reading

Unbelief is a belief.

J. M. Coetzee

unbelief belief