A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.
Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.
If it is characteristic of the wise man to do nothing useless, no one will surpass me in wisdom: I do not even lower myself to useful things.
As long as you live on this side of the terrible, you will find words to express it; once you know it from inside, you will no longer find a single one.
Lucidity is the only vice which make us free – free in a desert.
Old age is the most unexpected thing of all that happens to man,” – notes Trotsky a few years before his end. If, as a young man, he had had the exact, visceral intuition of this truth, what a miserable revolutionary he would have made!
To exist is a state as little conceivable as its contrary. No, still more inconceivable.
Expression diminishes you, impoverishes you, lifts weights off you: expression is loss of substance, and liberation.
When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self-hatred actually strengthens self-attachment.
In order to conquer panic or some tenacious anxiety, there is nothing like imagining your own burial. An effective method, readily available to all. In order not to have to resort to it too often in the course of a day, best to experience its benefit straight off, when you get up. Or else use it only at exceptional moments, like Pope Innocent IX, who, having commissioned a painting in which he was shown on his deathbed, glanced at it each time he had to make some important decision.
We should repeat to ourselves, every day: I am one of the billions dragging himself across the earth’s surface. One, and no more. This banality justifies any conclusion, any behavior or action: debauchery, chastity, suicide, work, crime, sloth, or rebellion... Whence it follows that each man is right to do what he does.
Saintliness is a special kind of madness. While the madness of mortals exhausts itself in useless and fantastic actions, holy madness is a conscious effort towards winning everything.
The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us to be posted in the schools.
What right have we to be annoyed by someone who calls us a monster? The monster is unique by definition, and solitude, even the solitude of infamy, supposes something positive, a peculiar election, but undeniably an election.
When we think of the Berlin salons in the Romantic period, of the role played in them by a Henrietta Herz or a Rachel Levin, of the friendship between the latter and Crown Prince Louis-Ferdinand; and when we then think that if such women had lived in this century they would have died in some gas chamber, we cannot help considering the belief in progress as the falsest and stupidest of superstitions.
Nothing more abominable than the critic and, a fortiori, the philosopher in each of us: if I were a poet, I should behave like Dylan Thomas, who, when people would discuss his poems in his presence, would drop to the floor in a fit of convulsions.
The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.
Since we remember clearly only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others – the lucky ones – have a life, of course, but not the memory of life.
In a metropolis as in a hamlet, what we still love best is to watch the fall of one of our kind.
There is no false sensation.