Jews From France

"The eulogies of my intelligence are positively intended to evade the question "Is what she says true?""

"If people were told: what makes carnal desire imperious in you is not its pure carnal element. It is the fact that you put into it the essential part of yourself—the need for Unity, the need for God — they wouldn’t believe it. To them it seems obvious that the quality of imperious need belongs to the carnal desire as such. In the same way it seems obvious to the miser that the quality of desirability belongs to gold as such, and not to its exchange value."

"No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater — unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters."

"In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled — that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist."

"One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love — to serve the loved one without his knowing it — is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism."

"This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. By putting all our desire for good into a thing, we make that thing a condition of our existence. But we do not, on that account, make of it a good. Merely to exist is not enough for us. The essence of created things is to be intermediaries. They are intermediaries leading from one to the other, and there is no end to this."

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."

"It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people."

"We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist — or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming."

"Conformity is an imitation of grace."

"The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. … It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. … Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion."

"Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature."

"We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe."

"L’action est l’aiguille indicatrice de la balance. Il ne faut pas toucher à l’aiguille, mais aux poids."

"The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul — like pincers to catch hold of God."

"Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband."

"When we are the victims of illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty."

"Croire qu’on s’élève parce qu’en gardant les mêmes bas penchants (exemple : désir de l’emporter sur autrui) on leur a donné des objets élevés. On s’élèverait au contraire en attachant à des objets bas des penchants élevés."

"The human soul has need of disciplined participation in a common task of public value, and it has need of personal initiative within this participation. The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul."

"Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just. This reintegration with the good is what punishment is. Every man who is innocent, or who has finally expiated guilt, needs to be recognized as honourable to the same extent as anyone else."

"In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes. The human soul has need of some solitude and privacy and also of some social life. The human soul has need of both personal property and ."

"The human soul has need of truth and of freedom of expression. The need for truth requires that intellectual culture should be universally accessible, and that it should be able to be acquired in an environment neither physically remote nor psychologically alien."

"The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty. Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest or coup d'etat nor to an economic power based upon money. Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime."

"The needs of the soul can for the most part be listed in pairs of opposites which balance and complete one another. The human soul has need of equality and of hierarchy. Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings. Hierarchy is the scale of responsibilities. Since attention is inclined to direct itself upwards and remain fixed, special provisions are necessary to ensure the effective compatibility of equality and hierarchy."

"The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever. There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings. The limit is only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive an equal degree of attention."

"It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation. Law is the quality of the permanent provisions for making this aim effective."

"The proportions of good and evil in any society depend partly upon the proportion of consent to that of refusal and partly upon the distribution of power between those who consent and those who refuse. If any power of any kind is in the hands of a man who has not given total, sincere, and enlightened consent to this obligation such power is misplaced. If a man has willfully refused to consent, then it is in itself a criminal activity for him to exercise any function, major or minor, public or private, which gives him control over people's lives. All those who, with knowledge of his mind, have acquiesced in his exercise of the function are accessories to the crime. Any State whose whole official doctrine constitutes an incitement to this crime is itself wholly criminal. It can retain no trace of legitimacy. Any State whose official doctrine is not primarily directed against this crime in all its forms is lacking in full legitimacy. Any legal system which contains no provisions against this crime is without the essence of legality. Any legal system which provides against some forms of this crime but not others is without the full character of legality. Any government whose members commit this crime, or authorize it in their subordinates, has betrayed its function."

"Anyone whose attention and love are really directed towards the reality outside the world recognizes at the same time that he is bound, both in public and private life, by the single and permanent obligation to remedy, according to his responsibilities and to the extent of his power, all the privations of soul and body which are liable to destroy or damage the earthly life of any human being whatsoever. This obligation cannot legitimately be held to be limited by the insufficiency of power or the nature of the responsibilities until everything possible has been done to explain the necessity of the limitation to those who will suffer by it; the explanation must be completely truthful and must be such as to make it possible for them to acknowledge the necessity. No combination of circumstances ever cancels this obligation. If there are circumstances which seem to cancel it as regards a certain man or category of men, they impose it in fact all the more imperatively. The thought of this obligation is present to all men, but in very different forms and in very varying degrees of clarity. Some men are more and some are less inclined to accept — or to refuse — it as their rule of conduct."

"The respect inspired by the link between man and the reality alien to this world can make itself evident to that part of man which belongs to the reality of this world. The reality of this world is necessity. The part of man which is in this world is the part which is in bondage to necessity and subject to the misery of need. The one possibility of indirect expression of respect for the human being is offered by men's needs, the needs of the soul and of the body, in this world."

"If anyone possesses this faculty, then his attention is in reality directed beyond the world, whether he is aware of it or not. The link which attaches the human being to the reality outside the world is, like the reality itself, beyond the reach of human faculties. The respect that it makes us feel as soon as it is recognized cannot be shown to us by evidence or testimony."

"It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world. All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter."

"In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people."

"Music and silence... combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music."

"Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it’s music, not words, that provides power."

"Mime makes the invisible, visible and the visible, invisible."

"I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man’s destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth... I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish."

"Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?"

"To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man."

"Never get a mime talking. He won’t stop."

"Perhaps true appreciation of Marceau requires a step back in time. Before Marceau broke out of an invisible box and stepped into millions of American's living rooms on Max Liebman's "Show of Shows" nearly 40 years ago, you could fit the number of people who knew or much less cared anything about the art of pantomime in a Citroen. What we know of mime — the mute theatrics, the exaggerated body language, the requisite black-and-white get-up — was essentially minted by Marceau. … When Marceau is gone, we won't say, "There goes one of the world's greatest mimes," but "There goes 'the' world's great mime.""

"He's garnered honorary degrees from prestigious universities across America. He's had three wives, four children, survived the Holocaust, joined the Resistance and marched in Patton's army. All this, and he has a wickedly weird and original sense of humor. "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards," Marceau once said, "for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup." Even when you don't quite get it, Marceau makes you think twice."

"Silence is like a flame, you see?"

"No art is superior to another one, but every art looks for expertise and perfection. This is life, which continues; this is why there is no death. There is continuation. There is no silence. There is a continuation of thought."

"Fathers, I do not practice. I’m not religious in life, but when I perform "The Creation of the World" and when my soul is touched by the confrontation of "Good and Evil", then God enters in me."

"Chaplin made me laugh and cry without saying a word. I had an instinct. I was touched by the soul of Chaplin — Mime is not an imitator but a creator."

"I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment."

"I very much believe in the influence of magic and the subconscious on the literary process...I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in the books of Carlos Castaneda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernest Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world."

"The primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and not a stage in its historical development."