There were two in paradise and the choice was offered to them: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. No other choice. Tertium non datur. They, fools that they were, chose freedom.
What is the matter -a soul? You say a soul? Oh, damn it! We may soon retrogress even to the cholera epidemics.
Final things are for children, because infinity scares children, and it is important that children sleep peacefully at night.
And that was when I learned from my own experience that a laugh can be a terrifying weapon. With a laugh you can kill even murder itself.
I bent down to I-330 and drank her in with my eyes for the last time.
Without her the sun of tomorrow will be merely a tin circle, and the sky, tin painted blue, and I myself.
The same joy is in a stone which, thrown aloft, hesitates a little at the height of its flight and then rushes down to the ground. It is the same with a man when in his final convulsion he takes a last deep breath and dies.
To feel one’s self, to be conscious of one’s personality, is the lot of an eye inflamed by a cinder, or an infected finger, or a bad tooth. A healthy eye, or finger, or tooth is not felt; it is nonexistent, as it were. Is it not clear, then, that consciousness of oneself is a sickness? Apparently.
And, like children, you will swallow without protest everything bitter I shall give you only when it is carefully coated with the thick syrup of adventure.
We must all go insane – as soon as possible go insane.
How awful for you! By the looks of it, you’ve developed a soul.
Beauty? Why is the dance beautiful? Answer: Because this is a non-free movement, because the whole deep meaning of dance is in absolute, aesthetic subordination, ideal unfreedom.
What is it that people beg for, dream about, torment themselves for, from the time they leave swaddling clothes? They want someone to tell them, once and for all, what happiness is – and then to bind them to that happiness with a chain.
Un medic adevarat incepe sa-l trateze pe om cand acesta e inca sanatos, cand omul se va imbolnavi abia maine, poimaine, peste o saptamana.
Even among the ancients, the most mature among them knew that the source of right is might; that right is a function of power. And so, we have the scales: on one side, a grain, on the other a ton; on one side “I,” on the other “We,” the One State. Is it not clear, then, that to assume that the “I” can have some “rights” in relation to the State is exactly like assuming that a gram can balance the scale against the ton? Hence, the division: rights to the ton, duties to the gram.
And tomorrow... what? Nobody knows. You understand? Neither I nor anyone else knows. It’s unknown. You understand it’s come to an end, everything that was known? Now it’ll be new, never before seen or imagined.
My heart was light, quick, like an aero, and carrying, carrying me upward. I knew: tomorrow held some sort of joy. But what would it be?
One loves only the things one cannot conquer.
One must remember that mathematics is like death, never makes mistakes, never plays tricks. If we are unable to see those irrational curves or solids, it only means that they inevitably possess a whole immense world somewhere beneath the surface of our life...
This woman was just as irritating to me as an irrational term that accidently creeps into your equation and can’t be factored out.
Forget that you’re a gram and feel yourself a millionth part of a ton.