110+ J. M. Coetzee Quotes On Education, Literary And Profound

J. M. Coetzee is a South African novelist, essayist, linguist, translator, and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best known for his novels such as Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, and Disgrace. Coetzee has also written several non-fiction works, including Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, In the Heart of the Country, and Youth. Following is our collection on famous quotes by J. M. Coetzee on love, life, education.

Top 10 J. M. Coetzee Quotes

1. (I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.
2. The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.
3. When all else fails, philosophize.
4. We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.
5. I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering.
6. I don't think we are ready to die, any of us, not without being escorted.
7. Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
8. 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.
9. Strictly speaking, my interest is not in legal rights for animals but in a change of heart towards animals.
10. Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.

J. M. Coetzee Short Quotes

• From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth.
• The mode of consciousness of nonhuman species is quite different from human consciousness.
• I am corrupted to the bone with the beauty of this forsaken world.
• I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.
• The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.
• The devil is everywhere under the skin of things, searching for a way into the light.
• All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
• Nothing is worse than what we can imagine.
• Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
• Reason is simply a vast tautology.

J. M. Coetzee Quotes About Love

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

If you were blind you would hardly have fallen in love in the first place. But now, do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the visual apparatus? It may be in your better interest to throw a veil over the gaze, so as to keep her alive in her archetypal, goddesslike form. — J. M. Coetzee

In my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love. — J. M. Coetzee

I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best. — J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee Quotes About Life

In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life. — J. M. Coetzee

I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going. — J. M. Coetzee

The most important of all rights is the right to life, and I cannot foresee a day when domesticated animals will be granted that right in law. — J. M. Coetzee

Artists no longer starve in garrets. Some people may think this is not wholly a good thing, that being an artist has become too comfortable, at least in the West. I'm not sure I agree. It's a mark of civilization to encourage the arts and the life of the mind. — J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. — J. M. Coetzee

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

Restoration is a skilled profession. You might even call it an art in its own right, except that it is frowned on to be original. First rule of restoration: follow the intention of the artist. Never try to improve on him. — J. M. Coetzee

That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world. — J. M. Coetzee

It’s admirable, what you do, what she does, but to me animal-welfare people are a bit like Christians of a certain kind. Everyone is so cheerful and well-intentioned that after a while you itch to go off and do some raping and pillaging. Or to kick a cat. — J. M. Coetzee

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African. — J. M. Coetzee

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. — J. M. Coetzee

As for September 11, let us not too easily grant the Americans possession of that date on the calendar. Like May 1 or July 14 or December 25, September 11 may seem full of significance to some people, while to other people it is just another day. — J. M. Coetzee

The spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together. — J. M. Coetzee

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

The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation. — J. M. Coetzee

Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation. — J. M. Coetzee

My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms. — J. M. Coetzee

His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough"(72). — J. M. Coetzee

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

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing. — J. M. Coetzee

Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task. — J. M. Coetzee

Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat. — J. M. Coetzee

Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business. — J. M. Coetzee

Temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament: the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, It is a rule, like the Rule of St Benedict. — J. M. Coetzee

I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded. — J. M. Coetzee

Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me. — J. M. Coetzee

There is nothing more humanly beautiful than a woman's breasts. Nothing more humanly beautiful, nothing more humanly mysterious than why men should want to caress, over and over again, with paintbrush or chisel or hand, these oddly curved fatty sacs, and nothing more humanly endearing than our complicity (I mean the complicity of women) in their obsession. — J. M. Coetzee

There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on. — J. M. Coetzee

It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet. — J. M. Coetzee

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies,as a form of abstract thought. I dont wish to deny the uses of the intellect,but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere. — J. M. Coetzee

No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice). — J. M. Coetzee

If you have reservations about the system and want to change it, the democratic argument goes, do so within the system: put yourself forward as a candidate for political office, subject yourself to the scrutiny and the vote of fellow citizens. Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian. — J. M. Coetzee

The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves. — J. M. Coetzee

I am not the we of anyone — J. M. Coetzee

His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes through the cabin, through the wreck; washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin of my face. — J. M. Coetzee

What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded--God knows how--in making thousands and millions of individual human beings, lock well enought into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story. — J. M. Coetzee

My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth. — J. M. Coetzee

State censorship presents itself as a bulwark between society and forces of subversion or moral corruption. To dismiss this account of its own motives by the state as insincere would be a mistake: it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue ... must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice. — 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

I said to myself, 'If you don't sit down to it today, when will you ever sit down to it?' — J. M. Coetzee

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds. — J. M. Coetzee

It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from 'the wise man's mouth' but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth. — J. M. Coetzee

[Hariharan is] an outstanding writer. — J. M. Coetzee

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. — J. M. Coetzee

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt. — J. M. Coetzee

If I, this mortal shell, am going to die, let me at least live on through my creations. — J. M. Coetzee

To me, a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether you have a white or a black skin, and a philosopher who says that the distinction between human and nonhuman depends on whether or not you know the difference between a subject and a predicate, are more alike than they are unlike. — J. M. Coetzee

It is a world of words that creates a world of things. — J. M. Coetzee

As during the time of kings it would have been naive to think that the king's firstborn son would be the fittest to rule, so in our time it is naive to think that the democratically elected ruler will be the fittest. The rule of succession is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict. — J. M. Coetzee

He even knew the reason why: because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why. — J. M. Coetzee

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

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other. — J. M. Coetzee

When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring. — J. M. Coetzee

The barbarians come out at night. — J. M. Coetzee

Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it. — J. M. Coetzee

Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children. — J. M. Coetzee

To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the hysteria in the streets that the world of tranquil certainties we were born into is about to be extinguished. — J. M. Coetzee

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. — J. M. Coetzee

There are works of literature whose influence is strong but indirect because it is mediated through the whole of the culture rather than immediately through imitation. Wordsworth is the case that comes to mind. — J. M. Coetzee

There seemed nothing to do but live. — J. M. Coetzee

She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change. — J. M. Coetzee

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us. — J. M. Coetzee

And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant — J. M. Coetzee

Unbelief is a belief. — J. M. Coetzee

Just as we bemoan the passing away of the Great Novel, a great novelist is likely to emerge, perhaps even from Denmark or Switzerland, to prove us wrong. — J. M. Coetzee

I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world. — J. M. Coetzee

So it has come, the day of testing. Without warning, without fanfare, it is here, and he is in the middle of it. In his chest his heart hammers so hard that it too, in its dumb way, must know. How will they stand up to the testing, he and his heart? — J. M. Coetzee

Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences. — J. M. Coetzee

Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires? — J. M. Coetzee

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction? — J. M. Coetzee

The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role. — J. M. Coetzee

Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness... like a gush of warm water... All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil. — J. M. Coetzee

That was our first time together. Interesting, an interesting experience, but not earth-shaking. But then, I never expected it to be earth-shaking, not with him. What I was determined to avoid was emotional entanglement. A passing fling was one thing, an affair of the heart quite another. Of myself I was fairly sure. I was not about to lose my heart to a man about whom I knew next to nothing. — J. M. Coetzee

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths — J. M. Coetzee

Yet what happened in fact? In the middle of the night John woke up and saw me sleeping beside him with no doubt a look of peace on my face, even of bliss, bliss is not unattainable in this world. He saw me—saw me as I was at that moment—took fright, hurriedly strapped the armour back over his heart, this time with chains and a double padlock, and stole out into the darkness. — J. M. Coetzee

Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write this book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom...Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce's imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life. — J. M. Coetzee

Long visits don't make for good friends. — J. M. Coetzee

All over the world, as governments retreat from their traditional duty to foster the common good and reconceive of themselves as mere managers of national economies, universities have been coming under pressure to turn themselves into training schools equipping young people with the skills required by a modern economy. — J. M. Coetzee

Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence. Yet why these glorious sunsets, I ask myself, if nature does not speak to us with tongues of fire. — J. M. Coetzee

Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization. — J. M. Coetzee

he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone. — J. M. Coetzee

If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart. — J. M. Coetzee

It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us. — J. M. Coetzee

Life Lessons by J. M. Coetzee

1. J. M. Coetzee's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and empathy in order to create a more equitable and just society.
2. He often explores themes of colonialism, oppression, and the struggle for freedom in his works.
3. Through his writing, Coetzee encourages readers to think critically about the world around them and to strive for a more equitable future.