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Whatever they do and wherever they go, their mission is to keep watch; this is the command of their immemorial status as aliens. A solution to their fate does not exist.
This situation will last until the end of time. And it is to this situation that they owe the mishap of not perishing . . .
The confessional? a rape of conscience perpetrated in the name of heaven. And that other rape, psychological analysis!
Voltaire was the first literary man to erect his incompetence into a procedure, a method.
To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall? To publish one’s taints in order to amuse or exasperate!
Poem, novel, essay, play—everything seems too long. The writer—it is his function—always says more than he has to say: he swells his thought and swathes it with words.
Boredom has made me into a speechifier ashamed of raising his voice, a theoretician for the senile and the adolescent, for metaphysical menopauses, a vestige of a creature, a hallucinated clown.
I find it hard to understand your ambition to make a name for yourself in an age when the epigone is de rigueur.
I believe in the future of the terrible.
“Nothing procures so many crowns for the monk as discouragement.”
I am far from trying to pervert your hopes: life will take care of that. Like everyone else, you will proceed from one forfeiture to the next.
A master of every error, I could at last explore a world of appearances, of frivolous enigmas. Nothing more to pursue, except the pursuit of nothing.
I breathe in my fashion.
Each time I catch myself assigning some importance to things, I incriminate my mind, I challenge it and suspect it of some weakness, of some depravity.
I try to wrest myself from everything, to raise myself by uprooting myself; in order to become futile, we must sever our roots, must become metaphysically alien.
Wisdom? Never was any period so free of it—in other words, never was man more himself: a being refractory to wisdom.
Man attracts and appalls me, I love and hate him with a vehemence which condemns me to passivity.
The people inside us bears the responsibility for our excesses, our extravagances: what is more plebeian than a sentiment?
A genre becomes universal when it seduces minds which have no reason to embrace it.
Whenever philosophers insinuate themselves into Letters, it is to exploit their confusion or to precipitate their collapse.
There are a thousand perceptions of Nothing, and only one word to translate them: the indigence of language renders the universe intelligible . . .
If, in the arts, the epigone manages to inspire respect, nothing is more pathetic, on the other hand, than a second-class mystic, parasite of the sublime, plagiarist of ecstasies.
Ignorance would not be our fate if we dared hoist ourselves above our certitudes and above that timidity which, keeping us from working miracles, bogs us down in ourselves.
Every inspired state proceeds from a cultivated, willed inanition.
A well-fed humanity produces skeptics, never saints.
What is more fruitful than the worst, for the man who knows how to desire it? For it is not suffering which liberates, but the desire to suffer.
we ascend to the abyss, we fall into heaven.
We never follow the consistent rationalist for long; once we pluck out his mystery and know where he is headed, we abandon him to his system.
Even more than Socrates, it is Epicurus who nudged Philosophy toward Therapeutics.
The mob asks to be overwhelmed by invective, by threats and revelations, by shattering pronouncements: the mob loves a shouter.
Overrun on every side, stoicism, faithful to its principles, had the elegance to die without a struggle.
Recapitulate the history of ideas, acts, attitudes and you find that the future was always on the side of the rabble.
Since it is words that bind us to things, we cannot detach ourselves from things unless we first break with words.
A man who trembles dreams of making others tremble, a man who lives in terror ends his days in ferocity. Hence the case of the Roman emperors.
everything leads us to assume that man is the last caprice nature has allowed herself.
Naiveté, optimism, generosity—we encounter them among botanists, specialists in the pure sciences, explorers, never among politicians, historians, or priests.
but let us remember that lucidity is a condition peculiar to those who by their incapacity to love are as isolated from others as from themselves.
Entirely independent of our intellectual system, death, like every individual experience, can be confronted only by knowledge without information
To exist is to profit by our share of unreality, to be quickened by each contact with the void that is within.
In each man I passed I discerned a cadaver, in each odor a rot, in each joy a last grimace.
Everywhere I stumbled against future victims of the noose, against their imminent shadows: other men’s lives wore no mystery for The One who scrutinized them through my eyes.
I knew nothingness by heart, and I accepted my knowledge.
We last only as long as our fictions.
How difficult it is to dissolve oneself in Being!
