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I dream of an ideal confessor to tell everything to, spill it all: I dream of a blasé saint.
No difference between being and non-being, if we apprehend them with the same intensity.
Nescience is the basis of everything, it creates everything by an action repeated every moment, it produces this and any world, since it continually takes for real what in fact is not. Nescience is the tremendous mistake that serves as the basis of all our truths, it is older and more powerful than all the gods combined.
To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Have you suffered for knowledge?’ This is the crucial, perhaps the sole question we should ask ourselves when we scrutinize anything, especially a thinker. There is never too great a distinction made between those who have paid for the tiniest step toward knowledge and those, incomparably more numerous, who have received a convenient, indifferent knowledge, a knowledge without ordeals.
Ama nesciri, says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this precept.
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
In the days when I set off on month-long bicycle trips across France, my greatest pleasure was to stop in country cemeteries, to stretch out between two graves, and to smoke for hours on end. I think of those days as the most active period of my life.
Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.
I believe with that madman Calvin that we are predestined to salvation or damnation in our mother’s womb. We have already lived our life before being born.
A burial in a Norman village. I ask for details from a farmer watching the procession from a distance. ‘He was still young, barely sixty. They found him dead in the field. Well, that’s how it is … That’s how it is …’ This refrain, which struck me as comical at the time, has haunted me ever since. The fellow had no idea that what he was saying about death was all that can be said and all we know.
To live is to lose ground.
If we see things black, it is because we weigh them in the dark, because thoughts are generally the fruit of sleeplessness, consequently of darkness. They cannot adapt to life because they have not been thought with a view to life. The notion of the consequences they might involve doesn’t even occur to the mind. We are beyond all human calculation, beyond any notion of salvation or perdition, of being or non-being, we are in a particular silence, a superior modality of the void.
Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in everything.
My vision of the future is so exact that if I had children, I should strangle them here and now.
‘Everything is filled with gods,’ said Thales, at the dawn of philosophy; at the other end, at this twilight we have come to, we can proclaim, not only out of a need for symmetry but even more out of respect for the evidence, that ‘everything is emptied of gods.’
When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.
Philosophy is taught only in the agora, in a garden, or at home. The lecture chair is the grave of philosophy, the death of any living thought, the dais is the mind in mourning.
In Turin, at the beginning of his madness, Nietzsche would rush to his mirror, look at himself, turn away, look again. In the train that was taking him to Basel, the one thing he always asked for was a mirror. He no longer knew who he was, kept looking for himself, and this man, so eager to protect his identity, so thirsty for himself, had no instrument at hand but the clumsiest, the most lamentable of expedients.
