The mind that puts everything in question reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.
The best of myself, that point of light which distances me from everything, I owe to my infrequent encounters with a few bitter fools, a few disconsolate bastards, who, victims of the rigor of their cynicism, could no longer attach themselves to any vice.
The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.
For the victim of anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. His reaction to the one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.
De cierto tipo de vigilias se desprende el cuestionar el nacimiento.
This world can take everything from us, can forbid us everything, but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.
Man accepts death but not the hour of his death. To die any time, except when one has to die!
If I reflect on any moment of my life, the most feverish or the most neutral, what remains? – and what difference is there now between them? Everything having become the same, without relief and without reality, it is when I felt nothing that I was closest to the truth, I mean to my present state in which I am recapitulating my experiences. What is the use of having felt anything at all? There is no “ecstasy” which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!
You’re against everything that’s been done since the last war,” said the very up-to-date lady. “You’ve got the wrong date: I’m against everything that’s been done since Adam.
Deep inside, each man feels – and believes – himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it.
When someone complains that his life has come to nothing, we need merely remind him that life itself is in an analogous situation, if not worse.
Enlightened despotism: the only regime that can attract a disabused mind, one incapable of being the accomplice of revolutions since it is not even the accomplice of history.
To have opinions is inevitable, is natural; to have convictions is less so. Each time I meet someone who has convictions, I wonder what intellectual vice, what flaw has caused him to acquire such a thing. However legitimate this question, my habit of raising it spoils the pleasure of conversation for me, gives me a bad conscience, makes me hateful in my own eyes.
Bach’s music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded as a complete failure. Without Bach, God would be a complete second-rate figure.
I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.
History: a context in which the capital letters decompose, and with them, the men who imagine and cherish them.
I looked for my salvation in the Utopia, but I have only found some solace in the Apocalypse.
Call it insensitivity or a passion for remorse, I have never undertaken to rescue what little Absolute this world contains.
There is no limit-disappointment.