Great Throughts Treasury

"Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity."

"What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger."

"What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others."

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."

"Absolute freedom mocks justice; absolute justice denies freedom."

"An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself."

"Any authentic creation is a gift to the future."

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better."

"I have seen many people die because life for them was not worth living. From this I conclude that the question of life’s meaning is the most urgent question of all."

"I know of only one duty, and that is to love."

"If the world were clear, art would not exist."

"I'll tell you a big secret, my friend: Don't wait for the Last judgment. It happens every day."

"Integrity needs no rules."

"Live life to the point of tears."

"Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."

"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."

"The evil that is in this world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."

"We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage."

"We know that we live in contradiction, but that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as men is to find those few first principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice in the world which is so obviously unjust, and make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century."

"What is a rebel? A man who says, "No.""

"You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them."

"There is indeed such a thing as ?timing? ? the art of mastering rhythm ? but timing and hurrying are ... mutually exclusive."

"Clock time is merely a method of measurement held in common by all civilized societies, and has the same kind of reality (or unreality) as the imaginary lines of latitude and longitude. The equator is useless for stringing a rolled roast. To judge by the clock, the present moment is nothing but a hairline which, ideally, should have no width at all ? except that it would then be invisible. If you are bewitched by the clock you will therefore have no present. ?Now? will be no more than the geometrical point at which the future becomes the past. But if you sense and feel the world materially, you will discover that there never is, or was, or will be anything except the present."

"For the perfect accomplishment of any art, you must get this feeling of the eternal present into your bones ? for it is the secret of proper timing. No rush. No dawdle. Just the sense of flowing with the course of events in the same way that you dance to music, neither trying to outpace it nor lagging behind. Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present."

"Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one?s time. They say I?m active. But being active is still wasting one?s time, if in doing one loses oneself. Today is a resting time, and my heart goes off in search of itself. If an anguish still clutches me, it?s when I feel this impalpable moment slip through my fingers like quicksilver? At the moment, my whole kingdom is of this world. This sun and these shadows, this warmth and this cold rising from the depths of the air: why wonder if something is dying or if men suffer, since everything is written on this window where the sun sheds its plenty as a greeting to my pity? I can say and in a moment I shall say that what counts is to be human and simple. No, what counts is to be true, and then everything fits in, humanity and simplicity. When am I truer than when I am the world? My cup brims over before I have time to desire. Eternity is there and I was hoping for it. What I wish for now is no longer happiness but simply awareness."

"The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death. Besides, how can I define the link that leads from this all-consuming love of life to this secret despair? If I listen to the voice of irony, crouching underneath things, slowly it reveals itself. Winking its small, clear eye, it says: ?Live as if ?? In spite of much searching, this is all I know."

"There lay all my love of life: a silent passion for what would perhaps escape me, a bitterness beneath a flame. Each day I would leave this cloister like a man lifted from himself, inscribed for a brief moment in the continuance of the world? There is no love of life without despair of life."

"Without caf‚s and newspapers, it would be difficult to travel. A paper printed in our own language, a place to rub shoulders with others in the evenings enable us to imitate the familiar gestures of the man we were at home, who, seen from a distance, seems so much a stranger. For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat ? hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone). I have always wanted to write novels in which my heroes would say: ?What would I do without the office?? or again: ?My wife has died, but fortunately I have all these orders to fill for tomorrow.? Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn?t know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves. But also, soul-sick, we restore to every being and every object its miraculous value. A woman dancing without a thought in her head, a bottle on a table, glimpsed behind a curtain: each image becomes a symbol. The whole of life seems reflected in it, insofar as it summarizes our own life at the moment. When we are aware of every gift, the contradictory intoxications we can enjoy (including that of lucidity) are indescribable."

"But where are the conquering virtues of the mind? The same Nietzsche listed them as mortal enemies to heaviness of the spirit. For him, they are strength of character, taste, the ?world,? classical happiness, severe pride, the cold frugality of the wise. More than ever, these virtues are necessary today, and each of us can choose the one that suits him best. Before the vastness of the undertaking, let no one forget strength of character. I don?t mean the theatrical kind on political platforms, complete with frowns and threatening gestures. But the kind that through the virtue of its purity and its sap, stands up to all the winds that blow in from the sea. Such is the strength of character that in the winter of the world will prepare the fruit."

"If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate its strength and wonder. Our world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow in it. It has utterly surrendered to that evil which Nietzsche called the spirit of heaviness. Let us not add to this. It is futile to weep over the mind, it is enough to labor for it."

"Let us know our aims then, holding fast to the mind, even if force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. ?Tragedy,? [D.H.] Lawrence said, ?ought to be a great kick at misery.? This is a healthy and immediately applicable thought. There are many things today deserving such a kick."

"We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that?s all."

"It is not true that the heart wears out ? but the body creates this illusion."

"No? it is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life? What you must do now is nothing more than live like everybody else. You deserve, by what you are, a happiness, a fullness that few people know. Yet today this fullness is not dead, it is a part of life and, to its credit, it reigns over you whether you want it to or not. But in the coming days you must live alone, with this hole, this painful memory. This lifelessness that we all carry inside of us ? by us, I mean to say those who are not taken to the height of happiness, and who painfully remember another kind of happiness that goes beyond the memory."

"Oscar Wilde wanted to place art above all else. But the grandeur of art is not to rise above all. On the contrary, it must blend with all. Wilde finally understood this, thanks to sorrow. But it is the culpability of this era that it always needed sorrow and constraint in order to catch a glimpse of a truth also found in happiness, when the heart is worthy. Servile century."

"Sometimes, for violent minds, the time that we tear off for work, that is torn away from time, is the best. An unfortunate passion."

"The solidarity of bodies, unity at the center of the mortal and suffering flesh. This is what we are and nothing else. We are this plus human genius in all its forms, from the child to Einstein."

"Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness."