Great Throughts Treasury

"Man is a robot with defects."

"Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil."

"Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory."

"Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free - free in a desert."

"Man is unacceptable."

"Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other."

"Man starts over again every day, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows."

"Man started out on the wrong foot. the misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow."

"Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity."

"My enthusiasms ... constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future."

"My merit is not to be totally ineffectual but to have wanted to be."

"Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us."

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

"Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness."

"No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it."

"My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers."

"Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often."

"No longer wanting to be a man...dreaming of another form of failure."

"No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up."

"No one can enjoy freedom without trembling."

"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."

"No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one."

"Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious."

"Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty."

"Nothing proves that we are more than nothing."

"Nothing is tragic. Everything is unreal."

"On Creating - What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures."

"Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition."

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

"One hardly saves a world without ruling it."

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

"Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough."

"Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do, it suffers the contagion of our crises and, as this grand mal spreads, it vomits us forth, cursing us the while."

"One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other."

"Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers."

"Our first intuitions are the true ones."

"Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves."

"Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety ; refuge among anemic ideas."

"Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors."

"Pursued by our origins... we all are."

"Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness."

"Reality is a creation of our excesses."

"Romanian Language: a mixture of sun and dung with all its nostalgic ugliness, language of an accession to disaster."

"Russia - immensity and suffocation."

"Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim."

"Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all."

"Saints live in flames, wisemen, next to them."

"Schisms and heresies are nationalisms in disguise."

"Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."

"So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes."