Crime is not limited to the moment of the crime, or even a little before. Rather, it links up with a long antecedent state of mind, developed at leisure, remote from acts, a sort of idle daydream, an outlet for passing impulses (or a fit of bore dom). Often, too, it comes of a mental habit of reviewing all possibilities and shaping them without discrimination.
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When a man lays aside his work, wakes up from his labors, or his worries, or his love, and is surprised by what he finds, now that he contemplates his "naked" self and sees himself without recognizing who he is, he ceases by the same token to recognize his handiwork, his crime, his god, and what he was. He is arrested for the moment by the impossibility of conceiving that he still is the man he was just now and others think he is.
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In every man's life there has been a "minute too much" which he longs to buy back from reality, no matter what the cost. And so this "surplus" of the real becomes a nightmare.
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The foolish things he has done and those he has left undone share a man's regrets. Failures to win are often bitterer to him than losses.
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Knowing oneself doesn't mean reforming oneself.
Knowing oneself is a roundabout way of finding excuses for oneself.
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Everyone a murderer.
There is a small, furtive urge, a "reflex," that makes assassins of us all; it wipes out, mentally exterminates the man who says to us something we dislike.
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If looks could kill, how many dead men there would be!
And if looks could fecundate, how many children!
The streets would be full of corpses and pregnant women!
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Punishment depreciates morality since it provides a calculated compensation for each crime. It reduces the horror of the crime to the horror of its penalty; in a word, it absolves.
Thus it treats crime as something measurable, marketable— one can haggle over the price to pay.
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Deterrent justice.
If the manager of any sound concern ran it on the lines of our penal code, he would pass for crazy. Society catches a criminal, then locks him up for five years without troubling its head about the sixth. The man has got to live, but how? He no longer has cash or credit, or a job. When released, he is more dangerous, less utilizable, than before.
So it would seem that either Society is not managed at all, or that it is a badly run concern.
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What is known as Ethics covers all that can be said or written on the following problem:
For what object, in what cases, and by what means is a man, in the absence of any physical compulsion, led to do what he dislikes doing, and not to do what he likes?
A moral code becomes ridiculous when, in the last analysis, it amounts to this: "Act against yourself; you have nothing to fear, nothing to hope for."
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Morality is the ill-chosen, ill-reputed name given to one of the branches of that "universal economy" which includes the behavior to follow in one's dealings with oneself.
In the propositions "I master myself," "I yield to my self," and "I permit myself . . . ," the "I" and the "myself" seem to be different, but are they really so? An analysis of morality could be reduced to deciding whether these two pronouns are actually or fictitiously different.
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There are many things which cost us less effort to do than to think; and to do energetically than to do in moderation.
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Morals.
If the rules of a moral code were so effectively inculcated that its most heroic injunctions were automatically obeyed; if nobody could see a beggar without promptly, almost unthinkingly, undressing himself and clothing the unfortunate; or a beautiful person without a prudish qualm; or a leper without wanting to share his scabs—I doubt if the moralist would feel gratified.
For the moralist is not easy to please. He insists on struggles, even on backslidings, and a moral life without anguish, perils, setbacks, remorse and twinges of conscience would seem to him insipid. Repugnance, toil and tears, up hill strivings are basic to the perfecting of this curious art.
Merit, not conformity alone, has value and it is the energy expended in making a stiff gradient that counts.
Thus the moralist's morality is nothing more than pride in going against the grain. From which it would logically follow that a naturally moral person forcing himself to act immorally has the same "value" as an immoral person forcing himself to behave morally.
Nothing's simple. Yet there are always propensities indicated by our appetites and instincts. Here begins the case against that malefactor, the nervous system.
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Morality is a sort of art of the nonfulfillment of desires, the possibility of emasculating thoughts, and of doing what one doesn't like and not doing what one likes. If Evil were disagreeable and Good agreeable there would be an end of morality, no more "Good" or "Evil." Thus, in the last resort, the moral life means going against the current and sailing as close as possible to the shoals of lust and lures of the imagination.
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Temptations of the intelligence.
We must differentiate (within limits) between self-control— so far as this means repression, struggles, and self-conquest, and so forth—and consciousness which, while letting a man surrender to his impulses, nonetheless both illuminates and sees what is going on. All the same this conscious intelligence may be called on to exercise an indirect control. For example, instead of force, it can employ cunning and, with its analyses, depreciate, demagnetize, disarm, and, so to say, "debunk" a temptation that it could not vanquish by a frontal attack.
Instead of expelling the devil with a pitchfork you can offer him a chair, ask him to describe in detail the kingdoms he affects to offer, haggle with him, pester him with questions and (while he goes on droning blandishments in your ears) dissect the desires you feel welling up within you. And it is very rarely that promises, even realities, stand up to a scrutiny both critical and clear.
True, the same treatment may be applied to the "heroic virtues." "Both of you promise me kingdoms: one of you, on earth; the other, in heaven. Please go into details. Tempt me clearly. Bait your line with clean-cut images. But don't go fishing for me in muddy water."
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Virtues should be causeless.
It's not from charity that wc ought to love our enemies; rather, from a full control of one's own motives so as to steal a march on nature. And in any case there's always a touch of contempt in one's love of enemies.
It's not out of humility that we should think little of our selves ; it's a matter of prudence and experience. And it's a mistake to believe in one's "personality," one's Self or one's importance, and to regard oneself as a work signed by Nature and specially dedicated to herself "By the Author." Firstly, because entities must not be multiplied and because we should "believe" as little as possible, give credence only to things and persons worthy of it. But also because one must be accurate.
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A man may do his duty out of sheer "contrariness": do "the right thing" out of contempt for those who do it stupidly, piously, or pompously—or through fear. One should do good as a being who can just as well do evil.
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Love always has potential hatred in it and I know states of mind in which they are so little distinguishable that a special name should be invented for these complex forms of passionate solicitude.
Perhaps we are bound to fall into self-contradictions when we try to analyze what touches us most nearly. Viewed in close-up, "love" and "hatred" lose their meaning.
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An extraordinarily potent, intimate, and permanent bond may exist between individuals, a bond of such a nature that nothing they do can either strengthen or impair it. Distance —and even hatred—increase rather than weaken its tenacity.
Some people are heart-stricken, prostrated by the death of an enemy; there are afflictions which, when they come to a sudden stop, leave their victim feeling empty and his soul "at a loose end."
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I have met people so silly and suggestible as to let themselves be talked into believing that they don't love something that they love. And others talked into loving what they can't abide.
In people of this kind antipathies and affinities lack the strength of those physical aversions, untouched by reason, which nothing can reverse and turn into desires. The fur of such docile creatures takes the direction given it by the palm and the back of the hand alternately.
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Can we even conceive of individuals so intellectually detached as wholly to ignore and systematically to reject all first terms: all the initial impulses and reverberations caused by deeds and words, and let them die down naturally, with out reinforcing and transmitting them?
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Everything refers back to the brain: the world in order to exist and to be recognizable at all; the individual being in order to contact itself, communicate with and complicate itself. The brain is a place in which the Universe pricks and pinches itself so as to make sure it exists. "Man thinks," it says, "therefore I am." Thought is like a more or less prompt, more or less retarded or casual act or gesture; a gesture of the Being that has all possible things for limbs and parts of itself: Time, for its articulation and field of action; Reality, for its frontier and forbidden territories.
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The strongest minds are equally hard on themselves—indeed particularly on themselves. That is why they wear themselves out; yet, without this quality, they fail to reach their peak.
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The inferiority of the mind can be gauged in terms of the apparent magnitude of the objects and circuinstances it need to rouse it to action. And, especially, to the mass of lies and make-believe it needs to mask the feebleness of its means and its desires.
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When a man gazes ruminatively at his hand placed on the table he always falls into a philosophic daze. "I am in that hand, and I am not in it; it is at once "I" and 'not-I.'" And, in fact, that presence involves a contradiction. My body is a contradiction, it inspires and imposes contradiction, and it is this property that would be basic to any theory of the living being could we formulate it in precise terms. The same is true of thought, this thought I am recording and all my thoughts. They, too, are "I" and "not-I" simultaneously.
And here we have a problem calling for delicate analysis.
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One says "my mind" as one says "my foot" or "my eye." One says "He has a brilliant mind" as one says "He has blue eyes." "What a genius!" as one says "What a fine head of hair!" W h a t can be stranger, profounder, than to say " My memory"?
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The "soul" and "freedom" (the former once was taken for a "substance" and the latter for a property of that substance) are, judging by the occasions on which these words crop up in our minds, sometimes states and sometimes events. In short, both are names given to deviations from the norm: terms denoting certain anomalies in the normal functioning of consciousness.
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Modesty.
When we make an admirable thing (or one that we judge admirable) it is not really we, appearances notwithstanding, who make it—for the good reason that it surprises us. If we were honest with ourselves we would disown all that strikes us as exceptionally good in what we do, just as we disown our stupidities and lapses—all the peccadillos that make us blush for ourselves.
What's more, we should disown (and even more emphatically) our "lucky finds," since the chanccs are more against them in the majority of things and men, and therefore they are less ours than our blunders.
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We describe as "sound" or "good" ideas that existed in posse within ourselves and which we get, full-fledged, from others. They belong to us and it is only by chance that someone else has hit on them first—the same sort of chance that determines the date of a birth. We "recognize" them in ourselves.
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All things are strange. One can always sense the strangeness of a thing once it ceases to play any part; when we do not try to find something resembling it and we concentrate on its basic stuff, its intrinsicality.
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A peril of the mind: that of losing the power of thinking otherwise than polemically, as if one were facing an audience and in presence of the enemy.
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Objections are often due to a very simple cause: that the man who raises them has failed to find for himself the idea he is attacking.
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A "fact" is something that can do without meaning.
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Waking gives dreams a reputation they don't deserve.
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The traveler.
Cast a casual glance from the window of an hotel bedroom.
"The kingdom of Never-mind-what is inhabited by a race of Never-mind-whos!" So says your soul.
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There's nothing alarming about a rabbit, but a rabbit unexpectedly jumping up under our feet may scare us. The same is true of certain ideas that startle and uplift us, by reason of their suddenness—only to become a little later . . . what they really are.
Never leave out of account the unexpected! Keep what has never happened before present in your memory!
An unthinking, unforeseeing man is less upset, less shattered by a catastrophe than is the man of foresight. For the man without it, the unforeseen is almost nonexistent.
When a man has foreseen nothing, what can take him by surprise?
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A man was appraising dispassionately various lines of action.
" Supposing I got converted? " he asked himself.'' Hypothesis number One. That would certainly simplify my career. I'd annex all the benefits of a vast institution. It would give me peace of mind, I'd be protected, backed by hosts of people. I'd write books appealing to an enormous public. I could draw on an inexhaustible fund of texts and traditions for my themes, phrases, exegeses. Everything would be so simple. Resources ad libitum, an admirable mythology, etc., etc. Or—second hypothesis—supposing I made a 'killing' socially and in the public eye? That would be no less rewarding. The masses would acclaim me, tremble at my voice, I would become mightier than the mighty by abusing, hurling curses at them and valiantly championing the humble.
"So let's weigh the possibilities and try to see what tomorrow has in store. Let's choose which lambs, and of what color, we shall shear."
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Everything in which and for which we have immediate need of someone else is "ig-noble" (i.e., not noble). It means relying on someone else, courting his favor, winning his assent. And setting store on it!
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You belong to a party, my friend. That is to say, you have to applaud or vilify though it goes against the grain. The party insists on it.
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Who, then, has the courage to force himself to picture exactly the probable opinion of another man about himself? Who dares to contemplate the place that probably this out side mind assigns him? Yet it's well worth looking into.
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I have noticed that public opinion has no great dislike for people who go in for boasting, and indeed regards them as more "natural" than modest people, for whom it has a certain shrewd and not unjustified mistrust.
It may laugh at braggarts and showers-off, but it has a weakness for them, nonetheless, since such men are its wooers, thinking of it all the time and paying court to it.
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The modest man is one in whom the feelings of being one man among others is stronger than the feeling of being himself. He takes more notice of his traits in common with the general ran of men than of his differences and idio syncrasies. Such men tend more to merge into the herd than to stand out from it.
A lively awareness of differettce leads to pride or envy; an awareness of resemblance, to modesty or insolence, for there is an insolence that takes its stand on equality, claimed and insisted on.
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Bitter feelings stem almost always from not receiving a little more than one gives. The feeling of making a bad bargain.
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All we see of living beings is their means of defense and organs of attack: their hides, danger signals, motor exten sions, tools, and weapons.
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Behavior would greatly change, were all external demon strations—actions, words, and so forth—-judged according to the degree of consciousness they presuppose in those re sponsible for them; and if all that's done unthinkingly, with out self-control, were considered shameful.
How many expressions of opinion are products of intestinal flatulence! They relieve the man giving vent to them, but pollute the intellectual air of others. This goes for insults, mockery, and exclamations.
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What differentiates a forged bank note from a genuine one depends solely on the forger.
At the trial of a man accused of forgery two bills bearing the same number lay on the judge's table and it was quite impossible to detect any difference between them.
"What am I charged with?" the man asked. "Where is the corpus delicti ?"
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Our true tastes, the things we are truly ashamed of, our failings and our all-too-lucid mistrust of ourselves are housed in a secret museum kept under lock and key. And alongside this dungeon, in our mental underworld, dwells the Lord God, along with our thoughts of death, our moods of melancholy and the gardens of darkness.
Here is the abode of all the shadows, all the vague convictions which light and movement, freshening winds, reckless words and deeds, promising love affairs, desires, hard-fought struggles, and foretastes of success dispel or displace in the mood of the moment.
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How many great things would never come to birth but for a weakness that inspires them! All hail to Vanity, stingy mother of great things!
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There are two kinds of people: those who feel they are men and need other men and, secondly, those who feel them selves alone, not "men." For he who is truly alone is not "man."
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Calling someone a fool is arrogating to oneself all that one denies to him. That is legitimate; but it should be positively stated—which is something we take good care not to do.
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Being "good" to somone gives him the idea of reducing you to slavery. He has no inkling of this. But he takes advan tage of it all the more in his dealings with you. He gets a habit of taking your assent for granted. You raise no objections and you enter implicitly into the plans he makes since he regards you as "easy game."
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Conservative morality.
It has always to be the same man who owns this field, has possession of such-and-such a chattel. And it must always be the same man sleeping with the same woman, the same woman with the same man.
Which is why morality is "boring"; it consecrates monotony.
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We confuse "duty" with the laws of a man's being; but it's owing to ignorance of these laws that "duty" has been invented and enjoined.
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Our changes of mood give our acquaintances an impression of alternating truth and falsehood. And they always take the worse ones for the true.
We always regard the worse as basic to a character. Yet its "basis" is not—cannot be—either good or bad.
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Against an opponent, even an ideal opponent, one should never use arguments or invectives that, alone with oneself, one could not bring oneself to voice; things that can't be truly thought, that are forceful only in public and make us ashamed and miserable in our solitary night hours; when, that is to say, nothing prevents us from understanding all and sizing up the human situation; when there is no public to win over and cajole, no adversary to refute, dismantle, and destroy; when our own deficiencies are so glaring and our weaknesses as evident as those we could make game of.
Alone—that is to say residing in that which is and not in the world of appearances; a state in which question and answer are united, not pitted against each other.
Yet can there be a soul in which nothing of the theatrical persists; in which a personal light does not illuminate unevenly the various actors on the stage of Thought? And, watching them, you cannot fail to see that your opponent is built out of . . . yourself!
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The man who has a cold heart is for this reason best adapted to reality, for reality is unfeeling; "things" neither regret nor hope, neither make haste nor tarry. Also, the man's coldness is in harmony with Time; that is to say, with the growing probability of the contrary of that which is and affects our lives.
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Psalm.
The free mind abhors competition. It sides with its opponent.
It is too well aware that, though defeats may lay us low, victories annihilate us. A man who can overcome defeat will be wiped out, disintegrated by a victory.
The free mind loathes the two base thoughts implicit in "victory" and "defeat."
All that hinders the mind from forming all possible combinations of ideas debases it in its essential function— which is that of forming them.
It is impossible for it to hate something that it freely pictures to itself within itself. How hate what one has, one self, so clearly given form to?
It has no trouble in locating itself at any given point in the scheme of things and in a certain order of values—and at once the conflict ceases to be a conflict. Antagonists are merely polarities of one and the same system, a system that itself is changeful and will pass away.
It feels that fits of anger, grievances—like joys—are so many losses of its freedom; as the creaks and tremors of a motor are so many losses of its driving power.
But the mind is attached to a body, to a group, to a name, to nerves, to personal interests.
Our body is self-regarding, and desire keys it up to its highest power. Our whole existence is an injustice; our intelligence an offense per se—perhaps the most cruelly resented offense of all.
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What is an "intellectual"? Theoretically he should be a man with a knack for finding his way (more or less) through the mazes of his thought; who treats it somewhat condescendingly ; who does not trust himself too readily; who, because he knows their causes, is unimpressed by spectacular transactions in his mind; a man on whom eloquence gets no purchase, or gets it only in virtue of the art (presumably) implicit in it; and, finally, a man used to manipulating words and images.
To disbelieve comes naturally to him. Or anyhow, he makes a point of never attributing to what he hears more force than the spoken word conveys to him and can contain within itself.
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The angel is only a devil to whom a certain reflection has not, as yet, occurred.
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God created man and, finding that he was not lonely enough, gave him a wife, so as to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
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Thanks to the vulgar myth of happiness one can do pretty well anything one wants with men, and anything one wants with women.
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Growing old means experiencing the alterations of the permanent.
Translated by Stuart Gilbert
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