I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.
Do not be surprised. I do not like writers and I cannot stand their lies. They speak so as not to listen to themselves speak. If they did listen, they would know that they are nothing and then they would no longer be able to speak.
I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.
In fact, other people create for lack of power. I, on the other hand, do not need a work: I live.
Men die and they are not happy.
There is only one class of men, the privileged class.
Have you noticed that only death arouses our emotions? How we love thee friends who have just passed away, right? How we admire those master who no longer speak, their mouths full of dirt. We them we are not obligated.
It would be unjust, and moreover Utopian, for Shakespeare to direct the shoemakers’ union. But it would be equally disastrous forthe shoemakers’ union to ignore Shakespeare.
Have pity, Lord, on those who love and are separated.
Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.
But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.
History has shown that the less people read, the more books they buy.
If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.
The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war.
Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.
Liberty is dangerous.
History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject.
The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.
The first concern of any dictatorship is, consequently, to subjugate both labor and culture.