It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.

What is vertigo?

What is unique about the “I” hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person.

How can it be that leftist intellectuals (because the doctor with the mustache was nothing if not a leftist intellectual) are willing to march against the interests of a Communist country when Communism has always been considered the left’s domain?

Tomas turned off the radio and said, “Every country has its secret police. But a secret police that broadcasts its tapes over the radio—there’s something that could happen only in Prague, something absolutely without precedent!”

The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners.

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.

I see them one next to the other: both stepping down from the road along which mankind, “the master and proprietor of nature,” marches onward.

Es muss sein.”