We should never deprive ourselves of the “pleasures of piety

 Suddenly feeling that you know as much as God about anything and everything and quite as suddenly seeing this sensation vanish …

Firsthand thinkers meditate upon things; the others upon problems. We must live face to face with being, and not with the mind.

“What are you waiting for in order to give up?” —Each sickness sends us a summons disguised as a question. We play deaf, even as we realize that the game is played out and that next time we must have the courage, at last, to capitulate.

The older I grow, the less I react to frenzy, delirium. My taste, among thinkers, now goes only to extinct volcanoes.

As a young man, I bored myself to death, but I believed in myself. If I had no suspicion of the dreary creature I was to become, I knew nonetheless that, whatever happened, Perplexity would not desert me, that it would keep watch over my years with all the zeal and exactitude of Providence.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

I once remarked to an Italian friend that the Latin peoples are without secrecy—too open, too garrulous—and that I preferred nations ravaged by timidity, adding that a writer who has failed to know it in his life is worthless in his writings. “You’re right,” he answered. “When we describe our experiences in our books, there is a lack of intensity, and of extension, for we have already told them a hundred times before.” Whereupon we talked about the literature of femininity, of its absence of mystery in countries where the salon and the confessional prevail.

We should never deprive ourselves, I forget who once remarked, of the “pleasures of piety.” Has religion ever been justified more delicately?

This craving to revise our enthusiasms, to change idols, to pray elsewhere …

To stretch out in a field, to smell the earth and tell yourself it is the end as well as the hope of our dejections, that it would be futile to search for anything better to fest on, to dissolve into. …

When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment’s thought to the “meaning” of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not in abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music, in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of the means of expression, as well as by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naïveté, without which the arts can never begin again.

In one of the chapels of this ideally ugly church, we find the Virgin standing with her Son above the globe: an aggressive sect which has undermined and conquered an empire and inherited its flaws, beginning with gigantism.

It is written in the Zohar: “When man appeared, thereupon appeared the flowers.” I suspect they were there long before him, and that his advent plunged them all into a stupefaction from which they have not yet recovered.

Impossible to read a line by Kleist without thinking that he committed suicide: as if his suicide had preceded his works.

In the Orient, the oddest, the most idiosyncratic Western thinkers would never have been taken seriously, on account of their contradictions. This is precisely why we are interested in them. We prefer not a mind but the reversals, the biography of a mind, the incompatibilities and aberrations to be found there, in short those thinkers who, unable to conform to the rest of humanity and still less to themselves, cheat as much by whim as by fatality. Their distinctive sign? A touch of fakery in the tragic, a hint of dalliance even in the irremediable.

If, in her Foundations, Teresa of Avila lingers over the subject of melancholia, it is because she recognizes it as incurable. Physicians, she says, cannot deal with it, and the mother superior of a convent, faced with such sufferers, has but one recourse: to inspire them with the dread of authority, to threaten them, to frighten them. The saint’s method remains the best: only kicks, slaps, and a good beating will be effective in the case of a “depressive.” Moreover, such treatment is precisely what the “depressive” himself resorts to when he decides to end it all: he merely employs more thorough means.

In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

Easy to imagine the elements, bored with their exhausted theme, disgusted by their invariable and utterly predictable combinations, seeking some diversion: life would be merely a digression, merely an anecdote….

Anything that can be done seems to me pernicious and at best futile. If need be I can rouse myself but not act. I understand all too well Wordsworth’s description of Coleridge: eternal activity without action.

Whenever something still seems possible, I have the sense I have been bewitched.

The one sincere confession is the one we make indirectly—when we talk about other people.

We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so. When this power leaves us, we suffer prostration and collapse, a tête-à-tête with what is left of ourselves.

“The quality of every perfect form is to release the mind immediately, whereas the corrupt form holds the mind prisoner, like a bad mirror which tells us of nothing but itself.” In Kleist’s praise—and how un-German it sounds—of limpidity, his target was not philosophy in particular. Yet his is the best possible critique of philosophical jargon, a pseudo-language which, attempting to reflect ideas, merely assumes a contour at their expense, merely denatures and darkens them, merely calls attention to itself. By one of the most troublesome of all usurpations, the word has taken the leading role in a realm where it should be imperceptible.

“O Satan, my Master, I give myself unto thee forever!” How I regret not remembering the name of the nun who, having written these words with a nail dipped in her own blood, deserves to figure in an anthology of prayer and concision.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Ferocity occurs in all conditions save in joy. Schadenfreude, malicious joy, is a misrepresentation. To do evil is a pleasure, not a joy. Joy, the one true victory over the world, is pure in its essence, hence irreducible to pleasure, which is always suspect, both in itself and in its manifestations.

An existence constantly transfigured by failure.

The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.

Nature’s great mistake was to have been unable to confine herself to one “kingdom”: juxtaposed with the vegetable, everything else seems inopportune, out of place. The sun should have sulked at the appearance of the first insect, and gone out altogether with the advent of the chimpanzee.

If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of “problems,” it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.

The last whose disloyalty wre forgive are those we have disappointed.

What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately we do not have the same feeling about what we ourselves do.

“I was the Prophet,” Mohammed informs us, “when Adam was still between the water and the clay.” … When we have not had the pride to found a religion—or at least to destroy one—how do we dare show ourselves in the light of day?

Detachment cannot be learned: it is inscribed in a civilization. We do not tend toward it, we discover it in ourselves. I was thinking this when I read that a missionary, after eighteen years in Japan, had made only sixty converts, and old ones at that Moreover they escaped him at the last moment, dying in Japanese fashion, without remorse, without torments, worthy descendants of their ancestors who, to inure themselves, In the days of the Mongol wars, let themselves be impregnated by the nothingness of all things and by their own nothingness.

We can meditate upon eternity only in a prone position. For a considerable period, eternity was the Orientals’ principal concern: did they not prefer the horizontal position? Once we lie down, time ceases to pass, to count. History is the product of a race that stands. As a vertical animal, man was to get into the habit of looking ahead, not only in space but in time as well. To which wretched origins we may trace the Future!

Every misanthrope, however sincere, at times reminds me of that old poet, bedridden and utterly forgotten, who in a rage with his contemporaries declared he would receive none of them. His wife, out of charity, would ring at the door from time to time….

A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so overtaxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust.

Whereas any sentence one has to write requires a pretense of invention, it takes little enough attention to enter into a text, even a difficult one. To scribble a postcard comes closer to creative activity than to read The Phenomenology of Mind.

Buddhism calls anger, “corruption of the mind,” manicheism “root of the tree of death.” I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

She meant absolutely nothing to me. Realizing, suddenly, after so many years, that whatever happens i shall never see her again, I nearly collapsed. We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.

Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.

The least impure thoughts are those which appear between our anxieties, in the intervals of our annoyance, in those deluxe moments our misery grants itself.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

If it is characteristic of the wise man to do nothing useless, no one will surpass me in wisdom: I do not even lower myself to useful things.

Impossible to imagine a degraded animal, a sub-animal.

O to have been born before man!

Try as I will, I cannot manage to scorn all those centuries during which men busied themselves with nothing more than perfecting a definition of God.

The most effective way to avoid dejection, motivated or gratuitous, is to take a dictionary, preferably of a language you scarcely know, and to look up word after word in it, making sure that they are the kind you will never use….

As long as you live on this side of the terrible, you will find words to express it; once you know it from inside, you will no longer find a single one.

There is no limit-disappointment.

Grievances of every kind pass, but their source abides, and nothing has any effect on it: unassailable and unvarying, it is our fatum.

To realize, in rage and desolation alike, that nature, as Bossuet says, will not long grant us “this morsel of matter she lends.”—This morsel of matter:. by dint of pondering it we reach peace, though a peace it would be better never to have known.

Paradox is not suited to burials, nor to weddings or births, in fact. Sinister—or grotesque—events require commonplaces; the terrible, like the painful, accommodates only the cliché.

However disabused one may be, it is impossible to live without any hope at all. We always keep one, unwittingly, and this unconscious hope makes up for all the explicit others we have rejected, exhausted.

The more laden he is with years, the more readily he speaks of his death as a distant, quite unlikely event. Life is now such a habit that he has become unfit for death.

A blind man, authentically blind for once, held out his hand: in his posture, his rigidity, there was something that caught you, that made you hold your breath. He was handing you his blindness.

We forgive only madmen and children for being frank with us: others, if they have the audacity to imitate them, will regret it sooner or later.

To be “happy” you must constantly bear in mind the miseries you have escaped. This would be a way for memory to redeem itself, since ordinarily it preserves only disasters, eager—and with what success!—to sabotage happiness.

After a sleepless night, the people in the street seem automatons. No one seems to breathe, to walk. Each looks as if he is worked by clockwork: nothing spontaneous; mechanical smiles, spectral gesticulations. Yourself a specter, how would you see others as alive?

To be sterile—with so many sensations! Perpetual poetry without words.

Pure fatigue—fatigue without cause, the kind that comes like a gift or a scourge: that is what helps me pull myself together, that is what affords me knowledge of my “self.” Once it leaves me, I am no more than an inanimate object.

Anything in folklore that remains alive comes from before Christianity. —The same is true of whatever is alive in each of us.

A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.

“Amid your most intense activities, pause a moment to ‘consider’ your mind”—this advice is surely not offered to those who “consider” their minds night and day, and who thereby have no need to suspend their activities, for the good reason that they engage in none.

Only what has been conceived in solitude, face to face with God, endures—whether one is a believer or not

A passion for musk is in itself an avowal. We know more about a stranger who yields himself up to it than about someone who Is deaf to musk and whom we see every day.

No meditation without a tendency to repetitiveness.

As long as God had him in tow, man advanced slowly, so slowly he did not even realize it. Now that he no longer lives in anyone’s shadow, he is in a rush, and deplores it—he would give anything to regain the old cadence.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

Satiety—I have just now uttered this word, and already I no longer know apropos of what, so readily does it apply to everything I feel and think, to everything I love and loathe, to satiety itself.

I have killed no one, I have done better: I have killed the Possible, and like Macbeth, what I need most is to pray, but like him too, I cannot say Amen.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born