Top 15 J. M. Coetzee Quotes

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

When all else fails, philosophize.

The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.

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

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.

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

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

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

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.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.”

“I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.

I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

Because a woman'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.

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

I am not the we of anyone