The most effective way to avoid dejection, motivated or gratuitous, is to take a dictionary, preferably of a language you scarcely know, and to look up word after word in it, making sure they are the kind you will never use.
All great events have been set in motion by madmen, by mediocre madmen. Which will be true, we may be sure, of the “end of the world” itself.
Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.
Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel – three enslavers of the mind. The worst form of despotism is the system, in philosophy and in everything.
To will, in the fullest sense of the word, is to be unaware that one wills, is to refuse to loiter over the phenomenon of the will. The man of action weighs neither his impulses nor his motives, still less does he consult his reflexes: he obeys them without reflecting upon them, without hampering them.
We should have been excused from lugging a body: the burden of the self is enough.
We should keep to a single language, and deepen our knowledge of it at every opportunity. For a writer, gossiping with a concierge in his own is much more profitable than arguing with a scholar in a foreign tongue.
Happy in love, Adam would have spared us History.
Not the fear of effort but the fear of success explains more than one failure.
The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech, in the very symbol of nullity.
Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
I may change my opinion on the same subject, the same event, ten, twenty, thirty times in the course of a single day. And to think that each time, like the worst impostor, I dare utter the word “truth”!
In Marx’s entire oeuvre, I don’t think there is a single disinterested reflection on death... I was pondering this at his grave in Highgate.
No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself.
If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of ‘problems’, it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.
I draw the curtains, and I wait. Actually, I am not waiting for anything, I am merely making myself absent. Scoured, if only for a few minutes, of the impurities which dim and clog the mind, I accede to a state of consciousness from which the self is evacuated, And I am as soothed as if I were resting outside the universe.
The book which, after demolishing everything, fails to demolish itself will have exasperated us to no purpose.
Bach was quarrelsome, litigious, self-serving, greedy for titles and honors, etc. So what! A musicologist listing the cantatas whose theme is death has remarked that no mortal ever had such a nostalgia for it. Which is all that counts. The rest has to do with biography.
An idea, a being, anything which becomes incarnate loses identity, turns grotesque.
A passion for music is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who is deaf to music and whom we see every day.