If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one

 I read him for the shipwrecked feeling I get from anything he writes. At first you follow, then you start going in circles, then you are caught up in a kind of mild unmenacing whirlpool, and you tell yourself you’re sinking, and then you do sink. But you don’t really drown—that would be too easy! You come back up to the surface, you follow all over again, amazed to see he seems to be saying something and to understand what it is, and then you start going round and round again, and you sink once more…. All of which is meant to be profound, and seems so. But once you come to your senses you realize it’s only abstruse, obscure, and that the distance between real profundity and the willed kind is as great as between a revelation and a whim.

Anyone who gives himself up to writing believes—without realizing the fact—that his work will survive the years, the ages, time itself. … If he felt, while he was at work on it, that it was perishable, he would leave off where he was, he could never finish. Activity and credulity are correlative terms.

“Laughter ceased, and after laughter smiles.” This apparently naive remark by a biographer of Alexsandr Blok defines to perfection the program of any and every downfall.

No easy matter, to speak of God when one is neither, a believer nor an atheist: and it is undoubtedly the drama we all share, theologians included—no longer capable of being either one or the other.

For a writer, progress toward detachment and deliverance is an unprecedented disaster. He, more than anyone else, needs his defects: if he triumphs over them, he is lost He must be careful, then, not to improve, for if he succeeds, he will regret it bitterly.

We must beware of whatever insights we have into ourselves. Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon—this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing.

What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant.

Tertullian tells us that in order to be cured, epileptics would go “and greedily suck the blood of criminals slaughtered in the arena.” If I were to heed my instinct, this would be the one type of medication, no matter what the disease, which I would adopt.

What right have we to be annoyed by someone who calls us a monster? The monster Is unique by definition, and solitude, even the solitude of infamy, supposes something positive, a peculiar election, but undeniably an election.

Two enemies—the same man divided.

“Never judge a man without putting yourself in his place.” This old proverb makes all judgment impossible, for we judge someone only because, in fact, we cannot put ourselves in his place.

If you love your independence, you must lend yourself, in order to protect it, to every turpitude; you must risk ignominy itself.

Nothing more abominable than the critic and, a fortiori, the philosopher in each of us: if I were a poet, I should behave like Dylan Thomas, who, when people would discuss his poems in his presence, would drop to the floor in a fit of convulsions.

Anyone who bestirs himself commits one injustice after the next, without a trace of remorse. Just bad humor. —Remorse is for those who do nothing, who cannot act. It replaces action for them, consoles them for their inefiectuality.

Most of our troubles come from our first impulses. The slightest enthusiasm costs more than a crime.

Since we remember clearly only our ordeals, it is ultimately the sick, the persecuted, the victims in every realm who will have lived to the best advantage. The others—the lucky ones—have a life, of course, but not the memory of a life.

What a bore, someone who doesn’t deign to make an impression. Vain people are almost always annoying, but they make an effort, they take the trouble: they are bores who don’t want to be bores, and we are grateful to them for that: we end by enduring them, even by seeking them out. On the other hand, we turn livid with fury in the presence of someone who pays no attention whatever to the effect he makes. What are we to say to him, and what are we to expect from him? Either keep some vestiges of the monkey, or else stay home.

Not the fear of effort but the fear of success explains more than one failure.

I’d like to pray with dagger-words. Unfortunately, if you pray at all, you have to pray like everyone else. Wherein abides one of the greatest difficulties of faith.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

Neither Bossuet, nor Malebranche, nor Fénelon deigned to mention the Pensées: apparently Pascal didn’t strike them as sufficiently serious.

Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease.

If only I could reach the level of the man I would have liked to be! But some power, increasing year by year, draws me down. Even to get back up to my surface, I have to employ stratagems I cannot think of without blushing.

There was a time when, in order to dispel any impulse of vengeance once I had endured some affront, I would imagine myself quite still in my grave. And I calmed down at once. We must not despise our corpse too much: it can be useful on occasion.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

The only way to reach another person at any depth is to move toward what is deepest in yourself. In other words, to take the opposite path from the one followed by so-called generous minds.

If only I could say with that Hasidic rabbi: “The blessing of my life is that I have never needed a thing before I possessed it!”

In permitting man, Nature has committed much more than a mistake in her calculations: a crime against herself.

Fear creates consciousness—not natural fear but morbid fear. Otherwise animals would have achieved a level of consciousness higher than ours.

As orangutang in the strict sense of the word, man is old; as historical orangutang, he is comparatively recent: a parvenu who has not had time to learn how to behave in life.

After certain experiences, we should change names, since we ourselves are no longer the same. Everything assumes another aspect, starting with death. Which seems close and desirable: we are reconciled to it, and we reach the point of calling it “man’s best friend,” as Mozart does in a letter to his dying father.

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

“Truth remains hidden to the man filled with desire and hatred” (Buddha)…. Which is to say, to every man alive.

Won over by solitude, yet he remains in the world: a stylite without a pillar.

“You were wrong to count on me.” Who can speak in such terms? God and the Failure.

Everything we achieve, everything that comes out of us, aspires to forget its origins, and succeeds only by opposing us. Hence the negative sign that marks all our successes.

There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.

Failure, even repeated, always seems fresh; whereas success, multiplied, loses all interest, all attraction. It is not misfortune but happiness—insolent happiness, it is true—which leads to rancor and sarcasm.

“An enemy is as useful as a Buddha.” Exactly, for our enemy watches over us, keeps us from letting ourselves go. By indicating, by divulging our least weakness, he leads us straight to our salvation, moves heaven and earth to keep us from being unworthy of his image of us. Hence our gratitude to him should be boundless.

We get a better hold of ourselves and of being when we have reacted against negating, dissolving books—against their noxious power. Fortifying books, actually, since they provoke the very energy which denies them. The more poison they contain, the more salutary their effect, provided we read them against the grain, as we should read any book, starting with the catechism.

The greatest favor we can do an author is to forbid him to work during a certain period. Short-term tyrannies are necessary—prohibitions which would suspend all intellectual activity. Uninterrupted freedom of expression exposes talent to a deadly danger, forces it beyond its means and keeps it from stockpiling sensations and experiences. Unlimited freedom is a crime against the mind.

Self-pity is not so sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker’s attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!

The stoic’s maxim, according to which we should submit uncomplainingly to things which do not depend on ourselves, takes into account only external misfortunes, which escape our will. But how to accommodate ourselves to those which come from ourselves? If we are the source of our ills, whom are we to confront? Ourselves? We manage, luckily, to forget that we are the guilty parties, and moreover existence is tolerable only if we daily renew this lie, this act of oblivion.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

The more gifted a man is, the less progress he makes on the spiritual level. Talent is an obstacle to the inner life.

To save the word “grandeur” from officialdom, we should use it only apropos of insomnia or heresy.

In classical India, the sage and the saint were combined in one and the same person. To have any notion of such a success, we must imagine, if we can, a fusion between resignation and ecstasy, between a cold stoic and a disheveled mystic.

Being is suspect. Then what is to be said of “life,” which is its deviation and stigma?

When someone tells us of an unfavorable opinion about ourselves, instead of being distressed, we should think of all the “evil” we have spoken of others, and realize that it is only justice that as much should be said of ourselves. Ironically, no one is more vulnerable, more susceptible, and less likely to acknowledge his own defects than the backbiter. Merely tell him about the slightest reservation someone has made in his regard, and he will lose countenance, lose his temper, and drown in his own bile.

Seen from the outside, harmony reigns in every sect, clan, and party; seen from the inside, discord. Conflicts in a monastery are as frequent and as envenomed as in any society. Even when they desert hell, men do so only to reconstruct it elsewhere.

The least conversion is experienced as an advance. Fortunately there exist exceptions.

One of my favorites is that eighteenth-century Jewish sect in which men went over to Christianity in order to debase themselves; and another is that South American Indian who, upon conversion, lamented that he must now become the prey of worms instead of being eaten by his children, an honor he would have enjoyed had he not abjured his tribe’s beliefs.

Only normal that man should no longer be interested in religion but in religions, for only through them will he be in a position to understand the many versions of his spiritual collapse.

When we recapitulate the stages of our career, it is humiliating to realize that we have not had the disasters we deserved, the ones we were entitled to expect.

In some men, the prospect of a more or less imminent end excites energy, good or bad, and plunges them into a frenzy of activity. Artless enough to try to perpetuate themselves by their endeavor, by their work, they move heaven and earth to finish, to conclude it: not a moment to lose.

The same perspective invites others to founder in what’s-the-use, in a stagnant clear-sightedness, in the unimpeachable truths of despond.

“My curse on the man who, in future editions of my works, knowingly changes anything—a sentence, or only a word, a syllable, a letter, a punctuation mark!” Is it the philosopher or the writer in Schopenhauer who speaks this way? Both at once, and this conjunction (when we think of the awful style of any philosophical work) is extremely rare. It is not a Hegel who would have uttered such a curse. Nor any other major philosopher, except Plato.

Nothing more aggravating than a seamless, unremitting irony which leaves you no time to breathe and still less to think; which instead of being inconspicuous, occasional, is massive, automatic, at the antipodes of its essentially delicate nature. Which in any case is how it is used in Germany, a nation which, having meditated upon it the most, is least capable of wielding it.

Anxiety is not provoked: it tries to find a justification for itself, and in order to do so seizes upon anything, the vilest pretexts, to which it clings once it has invented them. A reality which precedes its particular expressions, its varieties, anxiety provokes itself, engenders itself, it is “infinite creation,” and as such is more likely to suggest the workings of the divinity than those of the psyche.

Automatic melancholy: an elegiac robot.

At a grave, the words: game, imposture, joke, dream, come to mind. Impossible to think that existence is a serious phenomenon. Certainty of faking from the start, at bottom. Over the gate of our cemeteries should be written: “Nothing Is Tragic. Everything Is Unreal.”

I shall not soon forget the expression of horror on what was his face, the dread, the extreme suffering, and the aggression. No, he was not happy. Never have I seen a man so uncomfortable in his coffin.

Look neither ahead nor behind, look into yourself, with neither fear nor regret. No one descends into himself so long as he remains a slave of the past or of the future.

Inelegant to reproach a man for his sterility, when that is his postulate, his mode of achievement, his dream….

Nights when we have slept are as if they had never been. The only ones that remain in our memory are the ones when we couldn’t close our eyes: night means sleepless night.

In order not to have to resolve them, I have turned all my practical difficulties into theoretical ones. Faced with the Insoluble, I breathe at last….

To a student who wanted to know where I stood with regard to the author of Zarathustra, I replied that I had long since stopped reading him. Why? “I find him too naïve….”

I hold his enthusiasms, his fervors against him. He demolished so many idols only to replace them with others: a false iconoclast, with adolescent aspects and a certain virginity, a certain innocence inherent in his solitary’s career. He observed men only from a distance. Had he come closer, he could have neither conceived nor promulgated the superman, that preposterous, laughable, even grotesque chimera, a crotchet which could occur only to a mind without time to age, to know the long serene disgust of detachment.

Marcus Aurelius Is much closer to me. Not a moment’s hesitation between the lyricism of frenzy and the prose of acceptance: I find more comfort, more hope even, in the weary emperor than in the thundering prophet.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born