Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.
Taste has no system and no proofs.
It is not suffering as such that is most deeply feared but suffering that degrades.
One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.
To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content.
Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response.
This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.
As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.
Everything was simple, physical, painful, exalting. The world consisted of the four elements – land and water, firepower and distancing air.
The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.
Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism.
Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to get on a television show to reveal.
But I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.
Even more than comparing society to a family, comparing it to a body makes an authoritarian ordering of society seem inevitable, immutable.
The point is to get a good rhythm, to make it mindless, almost as a daydream. To walk like breathing. To make it what the body wants, what the air wants, what time wants.
A man never forgets his body the way a woman does, because a man is pushing his body, a part of his body, forward, to make the act of love happen. He brings the jut of his body into the act of love, then takes it back, when it has had its way.
It is the action of bodies on bodies, not bodies on minds, which the crowd enjoys.