The Ruin of Kasch Quotes

“Where there is no initiation, there is the autodidact. Anyone for whom knowledge is not wisdom transmitted through experience is enrolled in a university that is a correspondence course.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“Sacrifice requires perfect awareness of destruction: if this clear-sighted attention is missing, there is no sacrifice. For technology it's enough to justify with claims about its practical utility.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“They looked as if they were there for some celebration, not for the arrival of an enemy army.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“swoon: history abandons its wreckage to post-history. A perpetual farewell, that continues to repeat itself.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“The law was therefore close to becoming purely ornamental, a flourish of pompous rhetoric, a useful artifice when unveiling monuments, a pretext for a pharmacist’s discourse in the coffeehouse.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“Pero algo tengo que hacer,: entonces me encierro y leo, con un frenesí que me hace estremecer con frecuencia, de noche, cuando me sorprendo insultando en voz alta a seres extinguidos y sin embargo horrendamente activos.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“Above all, we have to remember, Marx is greedy. He wants more of everything. He is suspicious of quality unless it is simply the mark of greater quantity: even if quality could exist alone, it would always be less admirable than a quantity in continual prospect of increase.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“E***: Our fate is governed by two mummies: that of Lenin in his mausoleum and that of Bentham at University College, London.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“For society to be well ordered, it will have to regard great pleasures as hostile and troublesome in relation to the whole. But not because they conceal the power of the unlimited. On the contrary: because they would compel us to recognize that the power of the unlimited is concealed in money itself.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“People criticized Guénon for writing like a bookkeeper of metaphysics, with no enthusiasm, with no heart. They thought he lacked inspiration. But Guénon was simply obeying "the esoteric, and particularly the Rosicrucian precept according to which it was better to talk to every person in their own language.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“[the true historian's] desired prey is primarily what has eluded memory and what has had every reason to elude it. After lengthy training in this struggle with the opaque, he will be able to test himself against Plutarchan figures, who are, in contrast, obscured by an excess of testimony - that thick carapace history secretes to keep them remote from us. And the end of his arrogant rise, the historian wants to meet Napoleon as if the latter were a stranger. At this point he becomes part visionary, and can muster the insolence to begin a book as Léon Bloy did: 'The history of Napoleon is surely the most unknown of all histories.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch