Great Throughts Treasury

"Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off."

"Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it."

"He who hates himself is not humble."

"Hungarian Language - savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura...words of nectar and cyanide."

"I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known"

"Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis."

"Getting up in the middle of the night, I walked around my room with the certainty of being chosen and criminal, a double privilege natural to the sleepless, revolting or incomprehensible for the captives of daytime logic."

"From denial to denial, his existence is diminished: vaguer and more unreal than a syllogism of sighs, how could he still be a creature of flesh and blood? Anemic, he rivals the Idea itself; he has abstracted himself from his ancestors, from his friends, from every soul and himself; in his veins, once turbulent, rests a light from another world. Liberated from what he has lived, unconcerned by what he will live; he demolishes the signposts on all his roads, and wrests himself from the dials of all time. I shall never meet myself again, he decides, happy to turn his last hatred against himself, happier still to annihilate - in his forgiveness - all beings, all things."

"Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?"

"God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays."

"I feel I am free but I know I am not."

"I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul."

"I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next."

"I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual."

"I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies."

"I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations. I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy."

"I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers."

"I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free."

"I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers."

"I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness."

"If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse."

"If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised.""

"If I have been able to hold out till now, it is because each blow, which seemed intolerable at the time, was followed by a second which was worse, then a third, and so on. If I were in hell, I'd want its circles to multiply, in order to count on a new ordeal, more trying than its predecessor. A salutary policy, with regard to torments at least."

"Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce."

"If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame."

"If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices."

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

"I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?"

"Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day."

"Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself."

"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."

"In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world."

"In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men."

"In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws."

"In this dream, I was flattering someone I despise. Waking, a greater self-loathing than if I had really committed such vileness..."

"In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary."

"It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice."

"Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?"

"It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?"

"Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers."

"Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion."

"It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."

"It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other."

"Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful."

"Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin."

"Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us."

"Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui."

"Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown."

"Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy."

"Life is nothing; death, everything. Yet there is nothing which is death, independent of life. It is precisely this absence of autonomous, distinct reality which makes death universal; it has no realm of its own, it is omnipresent, like everything which lacks identity, limit, and bearing: an indecent infinitude."