She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens i shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.
However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this unconscious hope makes up for all the explicit others we have rejected, exhausted.
Excess of deliberation frustrates all actions. To expatiate upon sexuality is to sabotage it altogether. Eroticism, scourge of deliquescent societies, is an offense against instinct, an organized impotence. We do not reflect with impunity upon exploits that dispense with reflection. Orgasm has never been a philosophical event.
To be “happy” you must constantly bear in mind the miseries you have escaped. This would be a way for memory to redeem itself, since ordinarily it preserves only disasters, eager – and with what success! – to sabotage happiness.
The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air. All History is in a state of petrification; its odours shift toward the future: we rush toward it, if only for the fever inherent in any decomposition.
Wisdom is the last word of a dying civilization, the halo of historical sunsets, fatigue turned into a worldview, the final tolerance before the rise of fresher gods – and barbarism.
He who is lucid, understands himself, explains himself, justifies himself, and masters his acts will never execute a memorable action. Psychology is the hero’s tomb.
Whereas all beings have their place in nature, man remains a metaphysically straying creature, lost in Life, a stranger to the Creation.
To be something – unconditional – is always a form of madness from which life – flower of fixed ideas – frees itself only to fade.
Apart from a few examples of exhaustive melancholy, and a few unequalled suicides, men are merely puppets stuffed with red globules in order to beget history and its grimaces.
It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say ‘we’ with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke ‘others’ and regard himself as their interpreter – for me to consider him my enemy.
According to Meister Eckhart, divinity precedes God, being His essence, his unfathomable depth. What should we find at man’s inmost core which defines his substance in opposition to the divine essence? Neurasthenia – which is to man what divinity is to God.
The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equalled only by their futility.
Nescience is the basis of everything, it creates everything by an action repeated every moment, it produces this and any world, since it continually takes for real what in fact is not. Nescience is the tremendous mistake that serves as the basis of all our truths, it is older and more powerful than all the gods combined.
And if Indifference fills him to overflowing, if he makes it into a reality as vast as the universe itself, it is because Indifference is the practical equivalent of doubt, and in his eyes does doubt not have the prestige of the Unconditioned?
Though we ourselves have come too late, we shall be envied by our immediate successors, and still more by our remote descendants. In their eyes we shall have the look of privileged characters, and rightly so, for everyone wants to be as far as possible from the future.
Ferocity occurs in all conditions save in joy. Schadenfreude, malicious joy, is a misrepresentation. To do evil is a pleasure, not a joy. Joy, the one true victory over the world, is pure in its essence, hence irreducible to pleasure, which is always suspect, both in itself and in its manifestations.
It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
And this nothing, this everything, cannot give life a meaning, but it nonetheless makes life persevere in what it is: a state of non-suicide.