x-libris > x-libris's Quotes

“La plus intelligente des pensées, la plus admirable des actions, la plus belle des œuvres d'art sont vouées à l'insignifiance: elles sont circonstancielles, et sous menace de disparition plus ou moins prochaine. On aurait tort d'y confier la capacité d'attention dont dispose une vie d'homme: un tel investissement serait exorbitant par rapport à la précarité des biens sur lesquels on gagerait son capital.

Cet investissement n'a de sens, au gré d'une philosophie informée de l'insignifiance, que dans la mesure où c'est le bonheur qui est constamment visé à travers la précarité de l'oeuvre: ce qui suppose notamment qu'on ne demande pas à la création esthétique de protéger du passager et du frivole, mais seulement de témoigner de quelques instants de bonheur, qui lui tiennent très suffisamment lieu de raison d'être et de fin.”
― Clément Rosset, L'anti-nature. Éléments pour une philosophie tragique

“Ce que nous découvrons maintenant, de l'autre côté de Gutenberg, c'est que la perte ne vient pas seulement de la lacune mais aussi de l'excès. Pas seulement de la disparition matérielle ou mentale de l'écrit, mais de sa surabondance immaîtrisable. Pas seulement de la pénurie des images, mais de leur pullulement. C'est pourquoi il faut à présent changer la direction, changer le signe de la perte. La perte a longtemps été perçue en termes de déficit et de privation, comme une soustraction de réalité ou de savoir. Mais désormais nous devons inverser les signes et reconnaître, à côté du dommage par soustraction, un dommage par surabondance et amplification.
Nous apprenons qu’une information foisonnante et envahissante n’assure pas la présence et la visibilité de toutes les données. Nous commençons à mesurer ce qui se dissipe entre trop d’archives et trop de demandes d’attention. S’il est vrai que l’unique est fragile, il est vrai aussi que le démon est légion, le pullulement a un coût et l’excès engendre du délaissement. Entre un et beaucoup, beaucoup a pu paraître d’abord une protection ou même une garantie contre la disparition, tant qu’on voyait l’extinction d’être comme une pénurie poussée à la limite. Mais nous prenons conscience maintenant que beaucoup indéfiniment boursouflé ne garantit pas la visibilité.”
― Judith Schlanger, Présence des œuvres perdues

“A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”
― Marcel Proust, Time Regained

“Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“Les plus beaux livres sont ceux qui n'ont jamais été écrits.”
― Anatole France

“Il y a quelque chose de pire que d'avoir une mauvaise pensée.
C'est d'avoir une pensée toute faite.
Il y a quelque chose de pire que d'avoir une mauvaise âme et même de se faire une mauvaise âme.
C'est d'avoir une âme toute faite.
Il y a quelque chose de pire que d'avoir une âme même perverse.
C'est d'avoir une âme habituée.”
― Charles Péguy, Les oeuvres posthumes de Charles Peguy - Avec publication des textes de prose du Fonds Orleanais

“For man is that ageless creature who has the faculty of becoming many years younger in a few seconds, and who, surrounded by the walls of the time through which he has lived, floats within them as in a pool the surface-level of which is constantly changing so as to bring him within range now of one epoch, now of another.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

“I wonder where the dreams go that I don't remember. I do not know what to do with my hands when they have nothing to do. Even though it's not for me, I turn around when someone whistles in the street. Dangerous animals do not scare me. I have seen lightening. I wish they had slides for grown-ups. I have read more volumes one than volumes two. The date on my birth certificate is wrong. I am not sure I have any influence. I talk to my things when they're sad. I don't know why I write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during reunions. I have nothing against New Year's Eve. Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath. I do not ask "do you love me". Only once can I say "I'm dying" without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.”
― Édouard Levé, Autoportrait

“I like living, breathing better than working...my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.”
― Marcel Duchamp

“Art is dead, but the student is necrophiliac.”
― Internationale situationniste, On the Poverty of Student Life: Considered in Its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for Its Remedy

“I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“The taste of the apple ... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way ... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.”
― Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

“be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“Passer pour un idiot aux yeux d'un imbécile est une volupté de fin gourmet.”
― Georges Courteline, La Philosophie de Courteline

“The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“Le monde nous a été donné comme énigmatique et inintelligible, et la tâche de la pensée est de le rendre, si possible, encore plus énigmatique et encore plus inintelligible.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange

“Life is the hesitation between an exclamation mark and a question mark. After doubt there is a full stop.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those strange and perished states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it had to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make it clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext−subject is my former life. It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa. Let it be therefore understood that the facts were what I say they were, but the interpretation that I give them is what I am—now.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.”
― Henri Frederic Amiel

“when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. ”
― Steiner G

“All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“Contre le Tout il y aura toujours un reste, notre inadaptation.”
― Josep Rafanell i Orra

“Mon être ne subsiste que sous un point de vue suprême qui est justement incompatible avec mon point de vue. La perspective dans laquelle je m’évanouis à mes yeux, me restaure, image complète, pour l’œil irréel auquel j’interdis toute image. Image complète par rapport à un monde sans image qui me figure dans l’absence de toute figure imaginable. Être d’un non-être dont je suis l’infime négation qu’il suscite comme sa profonde harmonie. Dans la nuit deviendrais-je l’univers?”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“L'artiste qui n'a pas ausculté le cœur de l'homme, l'artiste qui ignore qu'il est un bouc émissaire, que son devoir est d'aimanter, d'attirer, de faire tomber sur ses épaules les colères errantes de l'époque pour la décharger de son mal-être psychologique, celui-là n'est pas un artiste.”
― Antonin Artaud