If Molière had given himself up to his abyss, Pascal — with his — would look like a journalist.
*
How I love those second-order minds (Joubert, in particular) who out of delicacy lived in the shadow of other men’s genius, fearing to have such a thing, rejecting their own!
*
English Romanticism was a happy mixture of laudanum, exile, and tuberculosis; German Romanticism, of alcohol, suicide, and the provinces.
*
German endurance knows no limits — even in madness: Nietzsche endured his eleven years, Hölderlin forty.
*
Mention of administrative rebuffs (“the law’s delay, the insolence of office”) among the justifications for suicide seems to me Hamlet’s profoundest utterance.
*
Every tormented “Occidental” suggests a Dostoyevskian hero with a bank account.
*
No one since Benjamin Constant has rediscovered the tone of disappointment.
*
Mind is the great profiteer of the body’s defeats. It grows rich at the expense of the flesh it pillages, exulting in its victim’s miseries; by such brigandage it lives. — Civilization owes its fortune to the exploits of a bandit.
*
We cannot sufficiently blame the nineteenth century for having favored that breed of glossators, those reading machines, that deformation of the mind incarnated by the Professor — symbol of a civilization’s decline, of the corruption of taste, of the supremacy of labor over whim.
To see everything from the outside, to systematize the ineffable, to consider nothing straight on, to inventory the views of others!… All commentary on a work is bad or futile, for whatever is not direct is null.
There was a time when the professors chose to pursue theology. At least they had the excuse then of professing the absolute, of limiting themselves to God, whereas in our century nothing escapes their lethal competence.
*
Naive enough to set off in pursuit of Truth, I had explored — to no avail — any number of disciplines. I was beginning to be confirmed in my skepticism when the notion occurred to me of consulting, as a last resort, Poetry: who knows? perhaps it would be profitable, perhaps it conceals beneath its arbitrary appearances some definitive revelation … Illusory recourse! Poetry had outstripped me in negation and cost me even my uncertainties…
*
Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.
*
Nothing desiccates a mind so much as its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas.
*
What are the occupations of the sage? He resigns himself to seeing, to eating, etc…., he accepts in spite of himself this “wound with nine openings,” which is what the Bhagavad-Gita calls the body. — Wisdom? To undergo with dignity the humiliation inflicted upon us by our holes.
*
Europe does not yet afford ruins enough for the epic to flourish. Yet everything suggests that, jealous of Troy and ready to imitate its fate, she will soon furnish themes so important that fiction and poetry will no longer suffice …
*
Had he not held onto one last illusion, I would gladly ally myself with Omar Khayyam, with his unanswerable melancholy; but he still believed in wine.
*
Do not apply yourself to Letters if, with an obscure soul, you are haunted by clarity. You will leave behind you nothing but intelligible sighs, wretched fragments of your refusal to be yourself.
*
In this “great dormitory,” as one Taoist text calls the universe, nightmare is the sole mode of lucidity.
*
Before being a fundamental mistake, life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.
*
As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.
*
Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn’t deserve to be known.
*
Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.
*
Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torments his nature demands?
*
Could I bear a single day without that charity of my madness which promises me the Last Judgment tomorrow?
*
The Real gives me asthma.
*
At the age when, for lack of experience, one takes to philosophy, I determined to write a thesis like everyone else. What subject to choose? I wanted one that would be both familiar and unwonted. The moment I imagined I had found it, I hastened to announce my discovery to my professor.
“What would you think of A General Theory of Tears? I feel ready to start work on that.”
“Possibly,” he said, “but you’ll have your work cut out, finding a bibliography.”
“That doesn’t matter so much. All History will afford me its authority,” I replied in a tone of triumphant impertinence.
But when, in his impatience, he shot me a glance of disdain, I resolved then and there to murder the disciple in myself.
*
Time is denied me. Unable to follow its cadence, I clutch or contemplate it, but follow it? never: it is not my element.
*
Our sadnesses prolong the mystery sketched by the mummies’ smile.
*
For a long time I believed in the metaphysical virtues of Fatigue: true, it drags us down to the roots of Time; but what do we bring back? Some twaddle about eternity.
*
“I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.” This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works of introspection.
*
How long does it take to be initiated into depression, cottage industry of the Vague? Some require only a second, others a lifetime.
*
Our disgusts? — Detours of the disgust with ourselves.
*
I have daily converse with my skeleton — something my flesh will never forgive.
*
I gallivant through the days like a prostitute in a world without sidewalks.
*
We take refuge behind our countenance; the madman is betrayed by his. He offers himself, denounces himself to others. Having lost his mask, he publishes his anguish, imposes it on the first comer, parades his enigmas. So much indiscretion is irritating … It is only natural that we consign him to strait jackets and isolation wards.
*
Becoming: an agony without an ending.
*
We rarely meditate in a standing position, still less walking. It is from our insistence on maintaining the vertical that Action is born; hence, to protest its misdeeds, we ought to imitate the posture of corpses.
*
Happy those monks who, late in the Middle Ages, ran from town to town announcing the end of the world! Was the fulfillment of their prophecies … delayed? At least they could vent their passions, give free rein to their terrors, releasing them upon the crowd; — illusory therapeutics in an age like ours, when panic, now among our mores, has lost its virtues.
*
A prejudice in favor of honor is the feature of a rudimentary civilization. It vanishes with the advent of lucidity, with the regime of cowards, of those who, having “understood” everything, have nothing left to defend.
*
I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away.
*
In my childhood, we boys played a game: we would watch the gravedigger at work. Sometimes he would hand us a skull, with which we would play soccer. For us that was a delight which no funereal thought came to darken.
For many years now, I have lived in a milieu of priests having to their credit many thousands of extreme unctions; yet I have not known a single one who was intrigued by Death. Later on I was to understand that the only corpse from which we can gain some advantage is the one preparing itself within us.
*
Without God, everything is nothingness; and God? Supreme nothingness.
*
How I love those second-order minds (Joubert, in particular) who out of delicacy lived in the shadow of other men’s genius, fearing to have such a thing, rejecting their own!
*
English Romanticism was a happy mixture of laudanum, exile, and tuberculosis; German Romanticism, of alcohol, suicide, and the provinces.
*
German endurance knows no limits — even in madness: Nietzsche endured his eleven years, Hölderlin forty.
*
Mention of administrative rebuffs (“the law’s delay, the insolence of office”) among the justifications for suicide seems to me Hamlet’s profoundest utterance.
*
Every tormented “Occidental” suggests a Dostoyevskian hero with a bank account.
*
No one since Benjamin Constant has rediscovered the tone of disappointment.
*
Mind is the great profiteer of the body’s defeats. It grows rich at the expense of the flesh it pillages, exulting in its victim’s miseries; by such brigandage it lives. — Civilization owes its fortune to the exploits of a bandit.
*
We cannot sufficiently blame the nineteenth century for having favored that breed of glossators, those reading machines, that deformation of the mind incarnated by the Professor — symbol of a civilization’s decline, of the corruption of taste, of the supremacy of labor over whim.
To see everything from the outside, to systematize the ineffable, to consider nothing straight on, to inventory the views of others!… All commentary on a work is bad or futile, for whatever is not direct is null.
There was a time when the professors chose to pursue theology. At least they had the excuse then of professing the absolute, of limiting themselves to God, whereas in our century nothing escapes their lethal competence.
*
Naive enough to set off in pursuit of Truth, I had explored — to no avail — any number of disciplines. I was beginning to be confirmed in my skepticism when the notion occurred to me of consulting, as a last resort, Poetry: who knows? perhaps it would be profitable, perhaps it conceals beneath its arbitrary appearances some definitive revelation … Illusory recourse! Poetry had outstripped me in negation and cost me even my uncertainties…
*
Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.
*
Nothing desiccates a mind so much as its repugnance to conceive obscure ideas.
*
What are the occupations of the sage? He resigns himself to seeing, to eating, etc…., he accepts in spite of himself this “wound with nine openings,” which is what the Bhagavad-Gita calls the body. — Wisdom? To undergo with dignity the humiliation inflicted upon us by our holes.
*
Europe does not yet afford ruins enough for the epic to flourish. Yet everything suggests that, jealous of Troy and ready to imitate its fate, she will soon furnish themes so important that fiction and poetry will no longer suffice …
*
Had he not held onto one last illusion, I would gladly ally myself with Omar Khayyam, with his unanswerable melancholy; but he still believed in wine.
*
Do not apply yourself to Letters if, with an obscure soul, you are haunted by clarity. You will leave behind you nothing but intelligible sighs, wretched fragments of your refusal to be yourself.
*
In this “great dormitory,” as one Taoist text calls the universe, nightmare is the sole mode of lucidity.
*
Before being a fundamental mistake, life is a failure of taste which neither death nor even poetry succeeds in correcting.
*
As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.
*
Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn’t deserve to be known.
*
Stoicism for show: to be an enthusiast of nil admirari, an hysteric of ataraxia.
*
Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torments his nature demands?
*
Could I bear a single day without that charity of my madness which promises me the Last Judgment tomorrow?
*
The Real gives me asthma.
*
At the age when, for lack of experience, one takes to philosophy, I determined to write a thesis like everyone else. What subject to choose? I wanted one that would be both familiar and unwonted. The moment I imagined I had found it, I hastened to announce my discovery to my professor.
“What would you think of A General Theory of Tears? I feel ready to start work on that.”
“Possibly,” he said, “but you’ll have your work cut out, finding a bibliography.”
“That doesn’t matter so much. All History will afford me its authority,” I replied in a tone of triumphant impertinence.
But when, in his impatience, he shot me a glance of disdain, I resolved then and there to murder the disciple in myself.
*
Time is denied me. Unable to follow its cadence, I clutch or contemplate it, but follow it? never: it is not my element.
*
Our sadnesses prolong the mystery sketched by the mummies’ smile.
*
For a long time I believed in the metaphysical virtues of Fatigue: true, it drags us down to the roots of Time; but what do we bring back? Some twaddle about eternity.
*
“I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.” This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works of introspection.
*
How long does it take to be initiated into depression, cottage industry of the Vague? Some require only a second, others a lifetime.
*
Our disgusts? — Detours of the disgust with ourselves.
*
I have daily converse with my skeleton — something my flesh will never forgive.
*
I gallivant through the days like a prostitute in a world without sidewalks.
*
We take refuge behind our countenance; the madman is betrayed by his. He offers himself, denounces himself to others. Having lost his mask, he publishes his anguish, imposes it on the first comer, parades his enigmas. So much indiscretion is irritating … It is only natural that we consign him to strait jackets and isolation wards.
*
Becoming: an agony without an ending.
*
We rarely meditate in a standing position, still less walking. It is from our insistence on maintaining the vertical that Action is born; hence, to protest its misdeeds, we ought to imitate the posture of corpses.
*
Happy those monks who, late in the Middle Ages, ran from town to town announcing the end of the world! Was the fulfillment of their prophecies … delayed? At least they could vent their passions, give free rein to their terrors, releasing them upon the crowd; — illusory therapeutics in an age like ours, when panic, now among our mores, has lost its virtues.
*
A prejudice in favor of honor is the feature of a rudimentary civilization. It vanishes with the advent of lucidity, with the regime of cowards, of those who, having “understood” everything, have nothing left to defend.
*
I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away.
*
In my childhood, we boys played a game: we would watch the gravedigger at work. Sometimes he would hand us a skull, with which we would play soccer. For us that was a delight which no funereal thought came to darken.
For many years now, I have lived in a milieu of priests having to their credit many thousands of extreme unctions; yet I have not known a single one who was intrigued by Death. Later on I was to understand that the only corpse from which we can gain some advantage is the one preparing itself within us.
*
Without God, everything is nothingness; and God? Supreme nothingness.
*
When I am subject to the passions, to spasms of faith or intolerance, I would gladly go down into the street to fight and die as a partisan of the Vague, a fanatic of Perhaps …
*
Flattery turns character into a puppet, and in an instant, under its sway, the liveliest eyes assume a bovine expression. Insinuating itself deeper than disease, and transforming to the same degree our glands, our entrails, and our mind, flattery is the only weapon we possess to enslave our kind, to demoralize and to corrupt them.
*
Right in the middle of serious studies, I discovered that one day I would die …; my modesty was shaken. Convinced that I had nothing left to learn, I abandoned my studies to inform the world of such a remarkable discovery.
*
No longer ask me for my program: isn’t breathing one?
*
Every action flatters the hyena within us.
*
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
*
The merest subservience, even to the desire to die, unmasks our loyalty to the impostures of the self.
*
What is the use of getting rid of God in order to fall back on yourself? What good this substitution of one carrion for another?
*
To hope is to contradict the future.
*
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
*
Is it no more than chance that all those who broadened my views of death were society’s dregs?
*
It is not God, it is Grief which enjoys the advantages of ubiquity.
*
To be more unserviceable than a saint…
*
What a fuss over setting oneself up in the desert! More cunning than those first hermits, we have learned to seek it in ourselves.
*
To eliminate from oneself the toxins of time in order to retain those of eternity — such is the mystic’s child’s play.
*
I can understand and justify all the anomalies, in love and elsewhere; but that among fools some should be impotent — that is beyond me.
*
Had Noah possessed the gift of foreseeing the future, there is not a doubt in the world he would have scuttled the ark.
*
I love those nations of astronomers: Chaldeans, Assyrians, pre-Columbians who, for love of the sky, went bankrupt in history.
*
A book on war — Clausewitz’s — was Lenin’s pillow book and Hitler’s. — And we still wonder why this century is doomed!
*
When Aeschylus or Tacitus seems tepid, open a Life of the Insects — a revelation of rage and futility, an inferno which, fortunately for us, will have neither a playwright nor a chronicler. What would remain of our tragedies if a literate bug were to offer us his?
*
I observe, in terror, the diminution of my hatred of mankind, the loosening of the last link uniting me with it.
*
“A single thought addressed to God is worth more than the universe” (Katherina Emmerich). — How right she is, poor saint…
*
In dread — that megalomania in reverse— we become the center of a universal whirlwind, while the stars pirouette around us.
*
“When I shave,” this half-mad man once told me, “who if not God keeps me from cutting my own throat?” — Faith, in other words, would be no more than an artifice of the instinct of self-preservation. Biology everywhere.
*
How I’d like to be a plant, even if I had to keep vigil over a piece of shit!
*
To each his own … madness: mine was to suppose myself normal, dangerously normal. And since others seemed mad to me, I ended by being afraid, afraid of them and, even more, afraid of myself.
*
The man who, by successive inadvertences, has neglected to kill himself seems to himself no more and no less than a veteran of pain, a pensioner of suicide.
*
If it weren’t for blood’s insipid taste, the ascetic would define himself by his refusal to be a vampire.
*
When I was barely adolescent, the prospect of death flung me into trances; to escape them, I rushed to the brothel, where I invoked the angels. But with age, you become used to your own terrors, you undertake nothing more in order to be disengaged from them, you become quite bourgeois in the Abyss. — And although there was a time when I envied those Egyptian monks who dug their own graves in order to shed tears within them, if I were to dig mine now, all I would drop in there would be cigarette butts.
*
Flattery turns character into a puppet, and in an instant, under its sway, the liveliest eyes assume a bovine expression. Insinuating itself deeper than disease, and transforming to the same degree our glands, our entrails, and our mind, flattery is the only weapon we possess to enslave our kind, to demoralize and to corrupt them.
*
Right in the middle of serious studies, I discovered that one day I would die …; my modesty was shaken. Convinced that I had nothing left to learn, I abandoned my studies to inform the world of such a remarkable discovery.
*
No longer ask me for my program: isn’t breathing one?
*
Every action flatters the hyena within us.
*
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
*
The merest subservience, even to the desire to die, unmasks our loyalty to the impostures of the self.
*
What is the use of getting rid of God in order to fall back on yourself? What good this substitution of one carrion for another?
*
To hope is to contradict the future.
*
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
*
Is it no more than chance that all those who broadened my views of death were society’s dregs?
*
It is not God, it is Grief which enjoys the advantages of ubiquity.
*
To be more unserviceable than a saint…
*
What a fuss over setting oneself up in the desert! More cunning than those first hermits, we have learned to seek it in ourselves.
*
To eliminate from oneself the toxins of time in order to retain those of eternity — such is the mystic’s child’s play.
*
I can understand and justify all the anomalies, in love and elsewhere; but that among fools some should be impotent — that is beyond me.
*
Had Noah possessed the gift of foreseeing the future, there is not a doubt in the world he would have scuttled the ark.
*
I love those nations of astronomers: Chaldeans, Assyrians, pre-Columbians who, for love of the sky, went bankrupt in history.
*
A book on war — Clausewitz’s — was Lenin’s pillow book and Hitler’s. — And we still wonder why this century is doomed!
*
When Aeschylus or Tacitus seems tepid, open a Life of the Insects — a revelation of rage and futility, an inferno which, fortunately for us, will have neither a playwright nor a chronicler. What would remain of our tragedies if a literate bug were to offer us his?
*
I observe, in terror, the diminution of my hatred of mankind, the loosening of the last link uniting me with it.
*
“A single thought addressed to God is worth more than the universe” (Katherina Emmerich). — How right she is, poor saint…
*
In dread — that megalomania in reverse— we become the center of a universal whirlwind, while the stars pirouette around us.
*
“When I shave,” this half-mad man once told me, “who if not God keeps me from cutting my own throat?” — Faith, in other words, would be no more than an artifice of the instinct of self-preservation. Biology everywhere.
*
How I’d like to be a plant, even if I had to keep vigil over a piece of shit!
*
To each his own … madness: mine was to suppose myself normal, dangerously normal. And since others seemed mad to me, I ended by being afraid, afraid of them and, even more, afraid of myself.
*
The man who, by successive inadvertences, has neglected to kill himself seems to himself no more and no less than a veteran of pain, a pensioner of suicide.
*
If it weren’t for blood’s insipid taste, the ascetic would define himself by his refusal to be a vampire.
*
When I was barely adolescent, the prospect of death flung me into trances; to escape them, I rushed to the brothel, where I invoked the angels. But with age, you become used to your own terrors, you undertake nothing more in order to be disengaged from them, you become quite bourgeois in the Abyss. — And although there was a time when I envied those Egyptian monks who dug their own graves in order to shed tears within them, if I were to dig mine now, all I would drop in there would be cigarette butts.
Translation: Richard Howard
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