And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter – just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?
We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.
His yearning for new and faraway places, his desire for freedom, relief and oblivion was as he admitted to himself, an urge to flee-an urge to get away from his work, from the everyday site of a cold, rigid, and passionate servitude.
Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject – the actual enemy is the unknown.
One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!