"Life seems good only to the madman,” observed Hegesias ...

 Someone we regard highly comes closer to us when he performs an action unworthy of him—thereby he releases us from the calvary of veneration. And starting from that moment we feel a true attachment to him.

Nothing is worse than the coarseness and meanness we perpetrate out of timidity.

Faced with the Nile and the Pyramids, Flaubert thought of nothing but Normandy, according to one witness—nothing but the landscapes and manners of the future Madame Bovary. Nothing but that seemed to exist for him. To imagine is to limit oneself, to exclude: without an excessive capacity for rejection, no plan, no work, no way of realizing anything.

What in any way resembles a victory seems to me so dishonorable that i can do battle, in whatever circumstance, only with the firm intention of gaining the under hand. I have passed the stage where beings matter, and I see no reason to struggle in known worlds.

Philosophy is taught only in the agora, in a garden, or at home. The lecture chair is the grave of philosophy, the death of any living thought, the dais is the mind in mourning.

That I can still desire proves that I lack an exact perception of reality, that I am distracted, that I am a thousand miles from the Truth. “Man,” we read in the Dhammapada, “is prey to desire only because he does not see things as they are.”

I was shaking with rage: my honor was at stake. The hours passed, dawn was approaching. Was I going to ruin my night because of a trifle? Try as I would to minimize the incident, the reasons I invented to calm myself remained ineffectual. That anyone would dare do such a thing to me! I was on the point of opening the window and screaming like a madman, when the image of our planet spinning like a top suddenly seized my mind. My anger subsided at once.

Death is not altogether useless: after all, it is because of death that we may be able to recuperate the prenatal space, our only space….

How right it was to begin the day, as men once did, with a prayer, a call for help! Ignorant of whom to address ourselves to, we will end by groveling before the first cracked god to come along.

Acute consciousness of having a body—that is the absence of health…. Which is as much as to say that I have never been well

Everything is deception—I’ve always known that Yet this certitude has afforded me no relief, except at the moments when it was violently present to my mind….

The perception of the Precarious raised to the level of vision, of mystical experience.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

In very powerful sensations of pain, much more than in very slight ones, we observe ourselves, we divide into an external witness and the moaning, screaming sufferer. Everything which borders on torment wakens the psychologist in each of us, as well as the experimenter: we want to see how fer we can go in the intolerable.

What is injustice compared to disease? True, we may find it unjust to be sick. Moreover that is how each of us reacts, without troubling as to whether he is right or wrong. Sickness is: nothing more real than disease. If we call it unjust, we must dare to do as much with Being itself—we must speak, then, of the injustice of existing.

The Creation, as it was, amounted to little enough; tinkered with, it was worth still less. If only it had teen left to Its truth, Its primal nullity! The Messiah to come—the real one—is understandably slow about putting in an appearance. The task that awaits him is not going to te an easy one: how will he manage to deliver humanity from the mania of amelioration?

When, getting too used to ourselves, we begin to loathe ourselves, we soon realize that we are worse off, that self hatred actually strengthens self attachment

I do not interrupt him, I let him weigh each man’s merits, waiting for him to tell me off…. His Incomprehension of others is astounding. Subtle and ingenuous both, he judges you as if you were an entity or a category. Time having had no hold over him, he cannot admit that I am outside of whatever he forbids, that nothing of what he favors still concerns me. Dialogue becomes pointless with someone who escapes the procession of the years. I ask those I love to be kind enough to grow old.

Panic in the face of anything—of presence, of the void, of anything. Original panic.

God is, even if He isn’t.

D is incapable of assimilating Evil. He acknowledges its existence, but cannot incorporate it into his mind. If he were to emerge from hell he would be oblivious of his whereabouts, so remote is he in his thinking from what falls afoul…. Not the faintest trace of all he has endured in his ideas. Occasionally he has reflexes—no more than that—the reflexes of a wounded man. Closed to the negative, he does not discern that all we possess is merely a capital of non-being. Yet more than one of his gestures reveals a demonic spirit—demonic unawares. He is a destroyer obscured and sterilized by Good.

Curiosity to measure our progress into failure is the only reason we have to grow older. Wc thought we had reached the limit, we thought the horizon was blocked forever, we lamented in the thrall of our discouragement And now we realize that we can fall still lower, that there is something new, that all hope is not lost, that it is possible to sink a little further and thus to postpone the danger of getting stuck, even paralyzed….

“Life seems good only to the madman,” observed Hegesias, a Cyrcnaic philosopher, some twenty-three centuries ago. These are almost the only words of his we have…. Of all oeuvres to reinvent, his comes first on my list.

No one approaches the condition of a sage if he has not had the good luck to be forgotten in his lifetime.

To think is to undermine—to undermine oneself. Action involves fewer risks, for it fills the interval between things and ourselves, whereas reflection dangerously widens it.

… So long as I give myself up to physical exercise, manual labor, I am happy, fulfilled; once I stop, I am seized by dizziness, and I can think of nothing but giving up for good.

At the lowest point of ourselves, when we touch bottom and feel the abyss, we are suddenly raised up—defense-reaction or absurd pride—by the sense of being superior to God. The grandiose and impure aspect of the temptation to be done with it all.

A broadcast about wolves, with recordings of their howls. What a language! The most heartrending I know, and I shall never forget it. From now on, in moments of excessive solitude, I need merely recall those sounds to have the sense of belonging to a community.

From the moment defeat was in sight, Hitler spoke of nothing but victory. He believed in it—he behaved, in any case, as if he believed in it—and remained to the end walled up in his optimism, his faith. Everything was crumbling around him, every day belied his hopes but, persisting in his trust in the impossible, blinding himself as only the incurable can, he had the strength to go on to the end, to invent one horror after the next, and to continue beyond his madness, even beyond his destiny. Which is why we can say of him—of the man who failed so utterly—that he realized himself better than any other mortal.

“Aprà moi le déluge” is the unavowed motto of every person: if we admit that others survive us, it is in the hope that they will be punished for it.

A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything … Was boredom unknown to them?

This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity.

Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything…. Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

We come closer and closer to the Unbreathable. When we have reached it, that will be the great Day. Alas, we are only on the eve. …

A nation achieves and retains pre-eminence as long as it accepts conventions which are necessarily clumsy, as long as it is given over to prejudices without regarding them as such. Once it calls them by their name, everything is unmasked, everything is compromised.

To seek to rule, to take a role, to make the law—such things cannot be done without a powerful dose of stupidity: history, in its essence, is stupid. … It continues, it advances, because the nations liquidate their prejudices one after the other. If they were to be rid of them all at the same time, there would be nothing left but a blessed universal disintegration.

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

I was in perfect health, I felt better than ever. Suddenly I was cold, so cold that I was sure there was no cure for it. What was happening to me? Yet this was not the first time I had been in the grip of such a sensation. But in the past I had endured it without trying to understand. This time I wanted to know, and now. … I abandoned one hypothesis after the next: it could not be sickness; not the shadow of a symptom to cling to. What was I to do? I was baffled, incapable of finding even the trace of an explanation, when an idea occurred to me—and this was a real relief—that what I was feeling was merely a version of the great, final cold—that it was simply death exercising, rehearsing….

In paradise, objects and beings, assaulted by light from all sides, cast no shadow. Which is to say that they lack reality, like anything that is unbroached by darkness and deserted by death.

Our first intuitions are the true ones. What I thought of so many things in my first youth seems to me Increasingly right, and after so many detours and distractions, I now come back to it, aggrieved that I could have erected my existence on the ruin of those revelations.

I remember a place I have been only if I have had the luck to experience utter misery there.

At the street fair, watching a tumbler grimacing, shouting, exhausting himself, I told myself that he was doing his duty, whereas I was evading mine….

To manifest oneself, to produce in any realm is the characteristic of a more or less camouflaged fanatic. If we do not regard ourselves as entrusted with a mission, existence is difficult; action, impossible.

The certitude that there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact it is salvation. Starting from here, we might organize our own life as well as construct a philosophy of history: the insoluble as solution, as the only way out….

My weaknesses have spoiled my existence, but it is thanks to them that I exist, that I imagine I exist.

Man interests me only since he has ceased to believe in himself. While he was in his ascending phase, he deserved no more than indifference. Now he provokes a new sentiment, a special sympathy: compassionate horror.

For all the superstitions and shackles I have rid myself of, I cannot regard myself as a free man, remote from everything. A mania for desistance, having survived the other passions, refuses to leave me: it torments me, it perseveres, it demands that I continue renouncing, withdrawing. But from what? What is left to reject? I ponder the question. My role is over, my career finished, and yet nothing has changed in my life, I am at the same point in it, I must still desist, still and forever.

Ciaran 

The Trouble With Being Born