Watching I watch myself, what I see is my creation as though entering through my eyes perception is conception into an eye more crystal clear water of thoughts, what I watch watches me, I am the creation of what I see.
By suppressing differences and peculiarities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death.
Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life.
The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us.
By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.
Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.
It is the Revolution, the magical word, the word that is going to change everything, that is going to bring us immense delight and a quick death.
Power immobilizes; it freezes with a single gesture-grandiose, terrible, theatrical, or finally, simply monotonous-the variety which is life.
The American: a titan enamored of progress, a fanatical giant who worships “getting things done” but never asks himself what he is doing nor why he is doing it.
Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature – consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.
History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality – if only for an instant – by means of creation.
He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question.
Progress has peopled history with the marvels and monsters of technology but it has depopulated the life of man. It has given us more things but not more being.
The past reappears because it is a hidden present.
Horror immobolizes us because it is made of contradictory feelings: fear and seduction, repulsion and attraction. Horror is a fascination... Horror is immobility, the great yawn of empty space, the womb and the hole in the earth, the universal Mother and the great garbage heap... With horror we cannot have recourse to flight or combat, there remains only Adoration or Exorcism.
Therefore the fiesta is not only an excess, a ritual squandering of the goods painfully accumulated during the rest of the year; it is also a revolt, a sudden immersion in the formless, in pure being. By means of the fiesta society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws: it denies its own self.
Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.
I do not condemn the cult of pleasure; I lament the general vulgarity.
A saint speaks with God or with himself, two forms of silence.
Light is time reflecting on time.