He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?
Most religions do not make men better, only warier.
The planet’s survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.
As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn’t know the bad he might do.
Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days.
He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.
A ‘modern’ man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.
One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.
The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.
It doesn’t matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.
It is important what a man still plans at the end. It shows the measure of injustice in his death.
In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books.
Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.
Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.
I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.
Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day’s insolence.
People’s fates are simplified by their names.
One should use praise to recognize what one is not.
You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.
Learning is the art of ignoring.