Hegel is chiefly responsible for modern optimism. How could he have failed to see that consciousness changes only its forms and modalities, but never progresses?
The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.
In permitting man, Nature has committed much more than a mistake in her calculations: a crime against herself.
Only normal that man should no longer be interested in religion but in religions, for only through them will he be in a position to understand the many versions of his spiritual collapse.
Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.
The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are.
Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
I shall never utterly admire anyone except a man dishonored – and happy. There is a man, I should say, who defies the opinion of his fellows and who finds consolation and happiness in himself alone.
We invest ourselves with an abusive superiority when we tell someone what we think of him and of what he does. Frankness is not compatible with a delicate sentiment, nor even with an ethical exigency.
When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment’s thought to the “meaning” of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.
A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.
You with your veins full of night – you have no more place among men than an epitaph in the middle of a circus.
We must side with the oppressed on every occasion, even when they are in the wrong, though without losing sight of the fact that they are molded of the same clay as their oppressors.
The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.
History is irony on the move.
It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did – without a word – what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?
To that friend who tells me he is bored because he cannot work, I answer that boredom is a higher state, and that we debase it by relating it to the notion of work.
The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.
After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk. Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?