It’s absolutely essential that man should manage to preserve something other than what helps to make soles for shoes or sewing machines, that he should leave a margin, a sanctuary, where some of life’s beauty can take refuge and where he himself can feel safe from his own cleverness and folly. Only then will it be possible to begin talking of civilization.
You are the only man I ever respected,′ she said. ‘But you haven’t aged well. You have stayed young. Men who stay young don’t age well.
To ‘live’, to be truly alive, it is not enough simply to breathe, to suffer, nor even to be happy; life is a secret that cannot be discovered on one’s own. True living is done in pairs.
For a few minutes I tried to empty my mind entirely, to concentrate solely on breathing: sometimes it’s useful to rediscover simpler pleasures of life.
Besides, there’s nothing like the truth to make a convincing lie.
The best way to defend yourself against the power of money is to have some.
After all, Father, to understand their demonstration one doesn’t have to be very intelligent: it’s enough to have suffered.
I was angry at her, so angry – there is no greater weakness than to be in love with someone, to be at the mercy of it.
The difference between the English and the rest of mankind is that the English have long known the truth about themselves – which makes them always able to evade it discreetly, to slip round it.
I had made it my chief aim in Africa to hinder the spreading of our poisons – of our absurd political notions of democracy, self-government, parliamentary institutions, political parties, and all that threatened the African way of life and the traditions of the African tribes. I was here to watch over a pastoral civilization, to prevent it from going our way, and I was ready to do anything to carry out my self-appointed task.
It was obviously a typical human enterprise, very much of this earth, with nothing true or sincere about it, and doomed irremediably to the usual exploitations and treachery...
I searched for something to say, since you always have to fall back on words to prevent silence from speaking too loudly...
No doubt about it: numbers are the future. The world’s been learning to count since the days of chivalry ended and it’s only going to get worse. We’re about to witness the end of everything that isn’t quantifiable – honor, for example.
They died... Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its trunk inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid?
Je n’avais encore jamais vu un sourire aussi immuable et je me demandais si elle l’enlevait pour dormir.
Small attentions make great friends.
Never say die. You have to be mad, it’s true, to keep going and hope, but the first reptile who dragged his belly out of the water a million years ago to live on land without lungs and tried to breathe all the same – he too was mad. In the end the reptile became a man. We must always try to do the best we can – perhaps one day well become human, who knows.
She would bring him back to us as docile as a sheep. ‘Women,’ I concluded rather bitterly, ’have at their command certain means of persuasion which the best- organized police forces do not possess.
You see, deep in their hearts they’re convinced that a colonization that doesn’t end in a seditious movement and massacres is not a successful colonization. Perhaps they’re right, in a way.
The inhumanity of it is what makes Nazism so horrible – that’s what people always say. Sure. But there’s no denying the obvious: part of being human is the inhumanity of it. As long as we refuse to admit that inhumanity is completely human, we’ll just be telling ourselves pious lies.