A work settles nothing, just as the labor of a whole generation settles nothing. Sons, and the morrow, always start afresh.
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will...
Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.
The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
But here’s the worst part: the trick to life lies in hiding from those we hold most dear how much they mean to is; if not, we’d lose them.
There is mercy for everyone, except those who are bored with life.
You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. A village means that you are not alone, knowing that in the people, the trees, the earth, there is something that belongs to you, waiting for you when you are not there.
Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest – thought, action – is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.
Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.
At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.
The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.
The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.
It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.
War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.
Are you or aren’t you convinced that weakness is a man’s condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven’t fallen first?
Don’t mix wine and women.
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.