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Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.
“no man concerned with his own equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.”
“History is merely an inessential mode of being, the most effective form of our infidelity to ourselves, a metaphysical refusal.”
Novalis wrote that “philosophy is properly Home-sickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.”
One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.
“If a man loves nothing, he will be invulnerable” (Chuang Tse).
The apprenticeship to passivity—I know nothing more contrary to our habits.
For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.
The evolving absolute, Hegel’s heresy, has become our dogma, our tragic orthodoxy, the philosophy of our reflexes.
The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
“I am both wound and knife”—that is our absolute, our eternity.
The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.
To suffer: sole modality of acquiring the sensation of existence; to exist: unique means of safeguarding our destruction.
One always pays dearly for having taken “civilization” seriously, for having assimilated it to excess.
And his happiness, exempt from plenitude, from risk, from any tragic suggestion, has become that enveloping mediocrity in which he will be content forever.
The explosion of the Russians will make the nations tremble; already, they have introduced the Absolute into politics.
The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself.
No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.
Today, wherever we look, we see only an ersatz truth, an ersatz prejudice; those who lack even this ersatz seem more serene, but their smile is mechanical: a poor, last reflex of elegance . . .
The tired intellectual sums up the deformities and the vices of a world adrift. He does not act, he suffers; if he favors the notion of tolerance, he does not find in it the stimulant he needs.
To want to be free is to want to be oneself; but he is tired of being himself, of blazing a trail into uncertainty, of stumbling through truths.
A routed iconoclast, disillusioned with paradox and provocation, in search of impersonality and routine, half prostrated, ripe for the stereotype, the tired intellectual abdicates his singularity and rejoins the rabble.
All his philosophy has concluded in a refrain, all his pride foundered on a Hosanna!
The only part of the planet where existence seemed to have some justification is tainted with gangrene.
Conquest and Inquisition—parallel phenomena, products of Spain’s imposing vices.
To exempt themselves from action, oppressed peoples entrust themselves to “fate,” a negative salvation as well as a means of interpreting events: a philosophy of history for daily use, a determinist vision on an effective basis, a metaphysic of circumstance . . .
For all its lucidity, this people readily sacrifices to illusion: it hopes, it always hopes too much
The more closely we scrutinize our tomorrows, the closer we come to and the more we flee this people: all of us tremble at the obligation to resemble it some day . .
If he changes his country, his drama merely begins again: exodus is his seat, his certainty, his chez soi.
he is not, like us, abnormal by accident or out of snobbery, but naturally, without effort, and by tradition: such is the advantage of an inspired destiny on the scale of a whole people.
They credited only their own prejudices, whence the accusation of “misanthropy,” a crime imputed to them by Cicero, Seneca, Celsius, and, with them, all antiquity.
Did they relish their role as undesirables? Did they seek to be alone on earth in principle?
The most intolerant and the most persecuted of peoples unites universalism with the strictest particularism.
Since these retarded creatures, these haters, are becoming increasingly rare, and since Christianity finds no comfort for the loss of so lasting a popularity, it seeks on all sides an event likely to restore it to the foreground, to actuality.
Leaving to the Gentiles the ephemeral advantages of salvation, they opted for the lasting disadvantages of perdition.
Annas and Caiaphas embodied, to my eyes, good sense itself.
At grips, however, with the quasi-totality of humanity, they know that antisemitism does not represent a phenomenon of one period or another, but a constant, and that yesterday’s exterminators used the same terms as Tacitus . . .
What an idea, to want to be loved! They impose it upon themselves without success. After so many fruitless attempts, would they not be better off yielding to the obvious, admitting at last the substantiation of their disappointments?
If the Jews have not inflicted Him upon us, they nevertheless bear the responsibility of having conceived Him. That is a flaw in their genius. They could have done better.
A strange island, the ghetto, a tiny universe without roots, to the measure of its inhabitants, as remote from the life of the soil as angels or ghosts.
Forced to face their depths and fearing them, the Jews try to bypass, to elude them by clinging to the trifles of conversation: they talk, they talk . .
Nonetheless, by turning away, even temporarily, from our impulse to submit, they teach us to come to terms with a dizzying, unendurable world: they are masters at existing.
Of all those who suffered a long period of slavery, they alone have succeeded in resisting the charms of abulia.
Bitter and insatiable, lucid and impassioned, always in the avant garde of solitude, they represent failure on the move.
To understand them, or to approach them, we must have lost, ourselves, more than one homeland, must be, like them, citizens of every city, must fight without a flag against the whole world, must know, after their example, how to embrace and betray every cause.
It is true that they can cite no spectacular victory: but their very existence, is that not one? An uninterrupted, terrible victory, with no chance of ever ending!
Hunted from their homes, born expatriates, they have never been tempted to give up.
Rebelling against the ineluctable as against their miseries, they feel freer at the very moment when the worst should fetter their minds.
He who chooses time is engulfed by it and buries his genius therein.
