The spirit of rebellion can exist only in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The.
It had been learned that my mother had died recently at the home. Inquiries had then been made in Marengo. The investigators had learned that I had “shown insensitivity” the day of Maman’s funeral. “You understand,” my lawyer said, “it’s a little embarrassing for me to have to ask you this. But it’s very important. And it will be a strong argument for the prosecution if I can’t come up with some answers.
To be sure, freedom is not the answer to everything, and it has frontiers. The freedom of each finds its limits in that of others; no one has a right to absolute freedom. The limit where freedom begins and ends, where its rights and duties come together, is called law, and the State itself must bow to the law.
Since the beginning, on the dry earth of this measureless land scraped to the bone, a few men ceaselessly made their way, possessing nothing but serving no one, the destitute and free lords of a strange kingdom.
L’homme diminue la force de l’homme. Le monde la laisse intacte.
I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.
They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.
I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a ‘fiance’... Even there, in that home where lives were fading out... Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again... And I felt ready to live it all again too.
The man who exulted under torture, who hurled curses at God and beauty, who hardened himself in the harsh atmosphere of crime, now only wants to marry someone “with a future.” The mage, the seer, the convict who lived perpetually in the shadow of the penal colony, the man-king on a godless earth, always carried seventeen pounds of gold in a belt worn uncomfortably round his stomach, which he complained gave him dysentery.
It was just then that I noticed they were all sitting opposite me, around the caretaker, nodding their heads. For a split second, I had the ridiculous feeling that they were there to judge me.
And then he knew that war is no good, because vanquishing a man is as bitter as being vanquished.
We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear.
This abrupt separation, without any halfway state and with no predictable future, left us disconcerted, unable to react against the memory of that presence, still so close, yet already so far away, that now filled our days. In reality, we suffered doubly: from our own suffering first and then from what we imagined to be that of the absent loved one, whether son, spouse or lover.
True artists scorn nothing; they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.
Ce n’est pas de mourir qui m’effraie mais de vivre dans la mort.
I people the universe with forms in my own likeness. For I have not yet spoken of the sun.
If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right.
The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.
One must not cut oneself from the world. No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life. My whole effort, whatever situation, misfortune or disillusion, must be to make contact again. But even within this sadness I feel a great leap of joy and a great desire to love simply at the sight of a hill against the evening sky.