The barbarians come out at night.
It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.
Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn’t change the world: he reinterpreted it, then other people changed it.
When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring.
The spark of true poetry flashes when ideas are juxtaposed that no one has yet thought of bringing together.
Censorship is not an occupation that attracts intelligent, subtle minds. Censors can and often have been outwitted. But the game of slipping Aesopian messages past the censor is ultimately a sterile one, diverting writers from their proper task.
The end of confession is to tell the truth to and for oneself.
I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet, in nuances of tune and tone, in gaps and absences whose grammar has never been recorded.
It is a world of words that creates a world of things.
Reason is simply a vast tautology.
I speak to the broken halves of all our selves and tell them to embrace, loving the worst in us equally with the best.
Was it serious? I don’t know. It certainly had serious consequences.
Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.
And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant.
Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people.
I am not the we of anyone.
Pleasure is hard to come by, but pain is everywhere these days, I must learn to subsist on it.
I must not fall asleep in the middle of my life. Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going.
Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.
Unimaginable perhaps; but the unimaginable is there to be imagined.