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It’s a rule of life that we can, and should, learn from everyone. There are solemn and serious things we can learn from quacks and crooks, there are philosophies taught us by fools, there are lessons in faithfulness and justice brought to us by chance and by those we chance to meet. Everything is in everything. In certain particularly lucid moments of contemplation, like those of early afternoon when I observantly wander through the streets, each person brings me a novelty, each building teaches me something new, each placard has a message for me.
The search for truth – be it the subjective truth of belief, the objective truth of reality, or the social truth of money or power – always confers, on the searcher who merits a prize, the ultimate knowledge of its non-existence. The grand prize of life goes only to those who bought tickets by chance.
Don’t apologize, and don’t pay any attention to what we’re talking about… Every good conversation should be a two-way monologue… We should ultimately be unable to tell whether we really talked with someone or simply imagined the conversation…
I’ve reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.
Not even we could say what homes, duties and loves we’d left behind. We were, in that moment, no more than wayfarers between what we had forgotten and what we didn’t know, knights on foot defending an abandoned ideal. But that explained, along with the steady sound of trampled leaves and the forever rough sound of an unsteady wind, the reason for our departure, or for our return, since, not knowing what the path was, or why, we didn’t know if we were coming or going. And always, all around us, the sound of leaves we couldn’t see, falling we didn’t know where, lulled the forest to sleep with
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At a certain point in my written cogitation, I no longer know where the centre of my attention lies – whether in the scattered sensations I attempt to describe like enigmatic tapestries, or in the words which absorb me as I try to describe the act of describing and which, absorbing me, distract me and cause me to see other things. Beset by lucid and free associations of ideas, images and words, I say what I imagine I’m feeling as much as what I’m really feeling, and I’m unable to distinguish between the suggestions of my soul and the fruits born of images that fell from my soul to the ground,
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The people are never humanitarian. What most characterizes this fellow called ‘the people’ is a narrow focus on his own interests, and a careful exclusion – as far as possible – of the interests of others.
It’s useless to discern or foresee. The whole of the future is a mist that surrounds us, and when we glimpse tomorrow, it tastes like today.
Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.
To wrap the world around our fingers, like a thread or ribbon which a woman twiddles while daydreaming at the window… Everything comes down to our trying to feel tedium in such a way that it doesn’t hurt.
Our abstract intelligence serves only to elaborate systems, or ideas that are quasi-systems, which in animals corresponds to lying in the sun.
Happy the man who doesn’t think, for he accomplishes instinctively and through organic destiny what the rest of us must accomplish through much meandering and an inorganic or social destiny. Happy the man who most resembles the animals, for he is effortlessly what the rest of us only are by hard work; for he knows the way home, which the rest of us can reach only through byways of fiction and hazy return routes; for he is rooted like a tree, forming part of the landscape and therefore of beauty, while we are but myths who cross the stage, walk-ons of futility and oblivion dressed in real-life
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There’s no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know that you’re happy is to realize that you’re experiencing a happy moment and will soon have to leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything else. Not to know, on the other hand, is not to exist.
There’s no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people’s expense.
Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.
To think of our greatest anxiety as an insignificant event, not only in the life of the universe but also in the life of our own soul, is the beginning of wisdom. To think this way right in the midst of our anxiety is the height of wisdom. While we’re actually suffering, our human pain seems infinite. But human pain isn’t infinite, because nothing human is infinite, and our pain has no value beyond its being a pain we feel.
Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen* justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.
For several minutes I studied the almost imperceptible effect of the sun penetrating into the still office… Pastimes of prisons! Only the incarcerated watch the sun move this way, like someone observing a file of ants.
Tedium is not the disease of being bored because there’s nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there’s nothing worth doing. This means that the more there is to do, the more tedium one will feel.
Life, according to Tarde,* is the search for the impossible by way of the useless,
There’s always what there is, and never what there should be, not for being better or worse but for being different.
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.
Man of ideals that I am, perhaps my greatest ambition is really no more than to keep sitting at this table in this café.
Meanwhile I’ve been going through the varied monotony of every day, the never-equal succession of the equal hours, life. Everything has been going well. If I’d been sleeping, it wouldn’t have gone any differently. I’ve stagnated, like a pond that doesn’t exist, among forsaken landscapes.
Why do I bother to remember? Weariness. Remembering is a repose, for it means not doing. For even greater repose, I sometimes remember what never was, and my memories of the countryside where I really lived can’t begin to compare, in sharpness and nostalgia, to my memories that inhabit – floorboard by creaking floorboard – the vast rooms of yesteryear that I never inhabited. I’ve become so entirely the fiction of myself that any natural feeling I may have is immediately transformed, as soon as it’s born, into an imaginary feeling. Memories turn into dreams, dreams into my forgetting what I
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Who among us, looking back down the path of no return, can say they followed it in the right way?
Once we’re able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life’s setbacks and calamities.
Nothing else… A little sunlight, a slight breeze, a few trees framing the distance, the desire to be happy, regret over time’s passing, our always doubtful science, and the always undiscovered truth… That’s all, nothing else…
Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets – if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life.
The art of dreaming is difficult, because it’s an art of passivity, in which we concentrate our efforts on avoiding all effort.
Postpone everything. Never do today what you can leave for tomorrow.* In fact you need not do anything at all, tomorrow or today.
Gold is worth no more than glass to a child. And is gold’s value truly any greater? The child obscurely senses the absurdity of the wraths, passions and fears he sees sculpted in adult gestures. And aren’t all our fears, hatreds and loves truly vain and absurd?
Whatever you’ve left for posterity is so characteristic of you that no one else will understand it, or it belongs only to your age and won’t be understood by future ages, or it speaks to all ages but won’t be understood by the final abyss into which all ages will fall.
How vain is all our striving to create, under the spell of the illusion of not dying!
Let us give up the illusion of hope, which betrays; of love, which wearies; of life, which surfeits but never satisfies; and even of death, which brings more than we want and less than we hope for.
What does it mean to possess? We don’t know. So how is it possible to possess anything? You will say that we don’t know what life is, and yet we live… But do we really live? To live without knowing what life is – is that living?
I’ve pitched my Empires in the Confused, at the edge of silences, in the tawny war that will do away with the Exact.
Among the sensations that inwardly torture us to the point of becoming pleasurable, the disquiet provoked by the world’s mystery is one of the most common and complex.
Only those who don’t seek are happy, because only those who don’t seek find; since they seek nothing, they already have it, and to already have – whatever it may be – is to be happy, just as not to think is the best part of being rich.
A phrase that resonates with images is worth so many gestures! A metaphor can make up for so many things!
A human creature, as far as I’m concerned, has no soul. The soul is his own affair.
From the artist’s viewpoint, anything extra counts as a deficit, for it interferes with and thus diminishes the desired effect.
You are no doubt asking me, within yourselves, what meaning these sentences have. Don’t make that mistake. Say goodbye to the childish error of asking words and things what they mean. Nothing means anything.
