Deep in his heart, man aspires to rejoin the condition he had before consciousness. History is merely the detour he takes to get there.
Each generation lives in the absolute: it behaves as if it had reached the apex if not the end of history.
The not at all negligible advantage of having greatly hated men is that one comes to endure them by the exhaustion of this very hatred.
The white race increasingly deserves the name given by the American Indians: palefaces.
Noble gestures are always suspect. Each time, we regret having committed them. Something false about them, something theatrical, attitudinizing. It is true that we regret ignoble gestures almost as much.
We dismiss the skeptic, we speak of an “automatism of doubt,” while we never say of a believer that he has fallen into an “automatism of faith.” Yet faith is much more mechanical than doubt, which has the excuse of proceeding from surprise to surprise – inside perplexity, it is true.
The future appeals to you? All yours! Myself I prefer to keep to the incredible present and the incredible past. I leave it to you to face the Incredible itself.
My greed for agonies has made me die so many times that it strikes me as indecent to keep on abusing a corpse from which I can get nothing more.
What is the point of what we say? Is there any meaning to this series of propositions which constitutes our talk? And do these propositions, taken one by one, have any object? We can talk only if we set aside this question, or if we raise it as infrequently as possible.
To hell with everything” – if these words have been uttered, even only once, coldly, with complete awareness of what they mean, history is justified and, with it, all of us.
We all believe in many more things than we think, we harbour intolerances, we cherish bloody prejudices, and, defending our ideas with extreme means, we travel the world like ambulatory and irrefragable fortresses. Each of us is a supreme dogma to himself; no theology protects its god as we protect our self; and if we assail this self with doubts and call it into question, we do so only be a pseudo-elegance of our pride: the case is already won.
I believe speech to be a recent invention, and find it hard to imagine a dialogue that dates back beyond ten thousand years. And even harder, a dialogue that will occur in not ten thousand but even a thousand years from now.
In a work of psychiatry, only the patients’ remarks interest me; in a work of criticism, only the quotations.
If only we could return to those ages when no utterance shackled existence, to the laconism of interjections, to the joyous stupor of the pre- verbal!
A privilege to live in conflict with one’s times. At every moment one is aware one does not think like the others. This state of acute dissimilarity, however indigent or sterile it appears, nonetheless possesses a philosophical status which one would be at a loss to seek in cogitations attuned to events.
Getting up with my head full of plans, I would be working, I was sure of it, all morning long. No sooner had I sat down at my desk than the odious, vile, and persuasive refrain: “What do you expect of this world?” stopped me short. And I returned, as usual, to my bed with the hope of finding some answer, of going back to sleep.
There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented. We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither memories nor anticipations, and without even knowing who we are. And it is then that the day seems useless, light pernicious, even more oppressive than the darkness.
Nothing is worse than the coarseness and meanness we perpetrate out of timidity.
If we do not regard ourselves as entrusted with a mission, existence is difficult; action, impossible.
Man is free – and sterile – only in the interval when the gods die; slave – and creative – only in the interval when, as tyrants, they flourish.