A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?
Je ne connais qu’un seul devoir et c’est celui d’aimer.
The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.
Come here, image.
Je ne sais plus si je vis ou si je me souviens.
The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter – these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable.
You alone will know why I killed myself. You know my principles. I hate those who commit suicide. Besause of what they do TO OTHERS. If you have to do it, you must disguise it. Out of kindness.
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.
You do not have to unburden your soul for everyone; it will be enough if you do that for those you love.
And with pain and joy, their hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to a happy death.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched.
Even men without a gospel have their Mount of Olives. And one must not fall asleep on theirs either.
Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
Only the one who does not know what is life may believe that it is beautiful and easy.
He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don’t change character, men are dogs to one another.
There had been as many plagues in the world as there had been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equelly unprepared.
When millions of people are starving, everyone is implicated.
Physical jealousy is a result of the imagination at the same time as being a self-judgment. One attributes to the rival the nasty thoughts one had oneself in the same circumstances.
In any case, the one man paved the way for the deeds of the other, in a sense foreshadowed and even legitimized by them.
At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words, to silence.