I was an idle king and my chariot dawdled; I waited for the sea but it never came.
If nihilism is the inability to believe, then its most serious symptom is not found in atheism, but in the inability to believe in what is, to see what is happening, and to live life as it is offered. This infirmity is at the root of all idealism. Morality has no faith in the world.
A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions.
Kita tidak pernah punya waktu untuk menjadi diri kita sendiri. Kita hanya punya waktu untuk menjadi bahagia.
Any fulfillment is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher fulfillment.
Aku tahu seberapa bahagia hidup yang dapat kuraih. Sebelumnya, aku masih terlalu muda. Aku menghalangi diriku sendiri. Sekarang, aku mengerti bahwa bertindak dan bercinta dan menderita, adalah hidup, memang, tapi itu hanyalah hidup dalam tahapan di mana kau jujur dan menerima hidupmu begitu saja, seperti pantulan satu-satunya dari pelangi kebahagiaan yang sama cantiknya, atau jeleknya, untuk semua orang.
I’ve lost that lucidity to which my friends used to enjoy paying respects. I say “my friends,” moreover, as a convention. I have no more friends;.
The world is beautiful, and outside it there is no salvation.
Comfortable optimism surely seems like a bad joke in today’s world.
Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in an action, can avoid committing murder.
Kau punya segalanya dalam dirimu. Kau punya hal paling mulia: perasaan bahagia. Tak usah berharap pada seorang laki-laki untuk membuat hidupmu bahagia. Karena itu, banyak wanita melakukan kesalahan. Temukanlah kebahagiaan dalam dirimu sendiri.
He asked me why I had put Maman in the home. I answered that it was because I didn’t have the money to have her looked after and cared for. He asked me if it had been hard on me, and I answered that Maman and I didn’t expect anything from each other anymore, or from anyone else either, and that we had both gotten used to our new lives.
Even in the prisoner’s dock it’s always interesting to hear people talk about you.
But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. “Begins” – this is important. Weariness comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. What follows is the gradual return into the chain or it is the definitive awakening. At the end of the awakening comes, in time, the consequence: suicide or recovery.
You must realize that men make war as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all their soul.
The defects of the West are innumerable, its crimes and errors very real. But in the end, let’s not forget that we are the only ones to have the possibility of improvement and emancipation that lies in free genius.
At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling.
She turned towards me. Her hair had fallen over her eyes and she was laughing.
But now the artist is in the amphitheatre. Of necessity, his voice is not quite the same; it is not nearly so firm.
Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again.