In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.
The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.
We change ideas like neckties.
All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?
To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.
A book has to dig through the wounds, more, it has cause a new one, a book it has to be dangerous.
It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.
I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
Afflicted with existence, each man endures like an animal the consequences which proceed from it. Thus, in a world where everything is detestable, hatred becomes huger than the world and, having transcended its object, cancels itself out.
A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.
The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.