All Quotes

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

"The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer."

"Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?"

"On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.""

"No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim."

"Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious."

"The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment."

"If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity."

"A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis."

"The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning."

"Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there."

"The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual."

"A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints."

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

"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."

"Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young."

"What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots."

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

"What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?"

"Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave."

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

"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."

"No one can enjoy freedom without trembling."

"For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion."

"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."

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

"A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate."

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

"A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions."

"A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb."

"One hardly saves a world without ruling it."

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

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

"Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen."

"The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it."

"Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea."

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

"We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves."

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

"Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact."

"To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy."

"Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires."

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

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

"The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others."

"Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration."

"To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world."

"Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself."

"Word — that invisible dagger."

"Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology."