Caesar? Don Quixote? Which of the two, in my presumption, would I take as a model? It makes no difference. The fact is that one day, in a far country, I set off to conquer the world, all the perplexities of the world …
Considering the city from an attic window, it seems to me quite as honorable to be a sacristan here as a pimp.
If I had to renounce my dilettantism, it is in howling that I would specialize.
You cease being young the moment you no longer choose your enemies, when you are content with those you have within arm’s reach.
All our resentments derive from one circumstance: remaining beneath ourselves, we have been unable to get back up, to rejoin … This we shall never forgive the others.
Adrift in the Vague, I cling to each wisp of affliction as to a drowning man’s plank.
To propagate disequilibrium, to aggravate mental disturbance, to construct sanatoriums on every street corner — forbid swearing.
Then you will comprehend its liberating virtues, its therapeutic function, the superiority of its method over that of psychoanalysis, of Eastern gymnastics or Catholic ones; you will understand, above all, that it is thanks to the wonders of swearing, to its constant aid at every moment that most of us have managed not to be criminals or lunatics.
We are born with such a capacity for admiration that ten other planets could scarcely exhaust it; — the earth manages in a trice.
To get up each morning as a thaumaturge determined to populate your day with miracles, and then to fall back into bed ruminating till dark the aggravations of love and money…
Contact with men has rubbed the bloom off my neuroses.
Nothing reveals the vulgar man better than his refusal to be disappointed.
When I haven’t a penny in my pocket, I compel myself to imagine the heaven of sounding light which constitutes, according to Japanese Buddhism, one of the stages the wise man must pass through in order to overcome the world — and maybe money, I would add.
Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.
In my childhood, we boys played a game: we would watch the gravedigger at work. Sometimes he would hand us a skull, with which we would play soccer. For us that was a delight which no funereal thought came to darken.
For many years now, I have lived in a milieu of priests having to their credit many thousands of extreme unctions; yet I have not known a single one who was intrigued by Death. Later on I was to understand that the only corpse from which we can gain some advantage is the one preparing itself within us.
Without God, everything is nothingness; and God? Supreme nothingness.
II
The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.
The moment an animal breaks down, it begins resembling a man. Just look at a rabid dog or an abulic one: as if it was awaiting its novelist or its poet.
Every profound experience is formulated in terms of physiology.
Flattery turns character into a puppet, and in an instant, under its sway, the liveliest eyes assume a bovine expression. Insinuating itself deeper than disease, and transforming to the same degree our glands, our entrails, and our mind, flattery is the only weapon we possess to enslave our kind, to demoralize and to corrupt them.
Within the pessimist an ineffectual kindness connives with an unsatiated malice.
I have dispatched God out of a need for meditation, I have rid myself of a last nuisance.
The more misfortunes surround us, the more trivial we become; even our gait is changed. They invite us to show off, they smother our person in order to waken within us the character.
… Had it not been for the impertinence of supposing myself the most wretched being on earth, I should have collapsed long since.
What an insult to man, supposing that in order to destroy himself he needs a stimulus, a destiny … Has he not already expended the best of himself in liquidating his own legend? In this refusal to endure, in this horror of self abides his excuse or, as we used to say, his grandeur.
Why abandon the game, when there remain so many for us to disappoint?
When I am subject to the passions, to spasms of faith or intolerance, I would gladly go down into the street to fight and die as a partisan of the Vague, a fanatic of Perhaps …
You have dreamed of setting the universe ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!
Right in the middle of serious studies, I discovered that one day I would die …; my modesty was shaken. Convinced that I had nothing left to learn, I abandoned my studies to inform the world of such a remarkable discovery.
A positive spirit gone wrong, the Destroyer believes, in his candor, that truths are worth the trouble of being destroyed. He is a technician the wrong way around, a pedant of vandalism, a distracted evangelist.
Aging, one learns to swap one’s terrors for one’s sneers.
No longer ask me for my program: isn’t breathing one?
The best way of distancing ourselves from others is to invite them to delight in our defeats; afterward, we are sure to hate them for the rest of our days.
“You must do some work, gain your livelihood, muster your strength.”
“My strength? I’ve wasted my strength, used it all up erasing whatever traces of God I could find within myself… and now I’ll be unemployed forever!”
Every action flatters the hyena within us.
At the nadir of our failures, we suddenly grasp the essence of death; — a limit-perception, refractory to expression; a metaphysical defeat which words cannot perpetuate. This explains why, on this theme, the interjections of an illiterate old woman enlighten us more than a philosopher’s jargon.
Nature has created individuals only to relieve Suffering, to help it spread and scatter at their expense.
Whereas it takes the sensibility of a man flayed alive or a long tradition of vice in order to associate pleasure with the consciousness of pleasure, pain and the consciousness of pain are identified even in an imbecile.
To conjure away suffering, to degrade it into pleasure — hoax of introspection, wile of the delicate, diplomacy of the whimper.
Having so often changed attitudes with regard to the sun, I am no longer sure what footing we’re on.
We discern a flavor in our days only when we dodge the obligation to have a destiny.
The more indifferent I am to men, the more they trouble me; and when I scorn them, I cannot approach them without stammering.
If we squeezed a madman’s brain, the liquid that emerged would seem like honey compared to the gall secreted by certain melancholies.
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
Even more than a defense mechanism, timidity is a technique, constantly perfected by the megalomania of the misunderstood.
Not having had the luck to have alcoholic parents, one must intoxicate oneself one’s whole life to make up for the heavy heredity of their virtues.
Can one speak honestly of anything except God or oneself?
III
The odor of the creature puts us on the track of a fetid divinity.
If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing! But in the universal purposelessness, we stand proud, ineffectual streetwalkers, riffraff well-pleased with having been right.
What anxiety when one is not sure of one’s doubts and wonders: are these actually doubts?
He who has not contradicted his instincts, who has not imposed upon himself a long period of sexual deprivation or has not known the depravities of abstinence, will be inaccessible to the language of crime and to that of ecstasy: he will never understand the obsessions of the Marquis de Sade nor those of Saint John of the Cross.
The merest subservience, even to the desire to die, unmasks our loyalty to the impostures of the self.
When you s
uffer the temptation of Good, go to the marketplace and out of the crowd choose an old, disinherited woman and step on her toes. You will stare at her outrage without answering so much as a word, so that she may finally know, thanks to the spasm afforded by the abuse of an adjective, a moment’s glory.
What is the use of getting rid of God in order to fall back on yourself? What good this substitution of one carrion for another?
The beggar is a poor man who, impatient with adventures, has abandoned poverty in order to explore the jungles of pity.
We cannot avoid the defects of men without fleeing, thereby, their virtues. So we ruin ourselves by wisdom.
Without the hope of a greater pain, I could not endure the one of the moment, however infinite.
To hope is to contradict the future.
For all eternity, God has chosen everything for us, down to our neckties.
No action, no success without a total attention to secondary causes … Life is an insect’s occupation.
The tenacity I have deployed to combat the magic of suicide would have easily sufficed to achieve my salvation, to pulverize myself within God.
When nothing needles us further, “depression” is there, the last stimulant. No longer able to do without it, we pursue it in diversion as in prayer. And so greatly do we dread being deprived of it that “Give us this day our daily blues” becomes the refrain of our expectations, our entreaties.
However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; — unless, by taste or profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them.
The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.
What gives me the illusion of never having been duped is that I have never loved anything without having thereby hated it.
However versed we may be in satiety, we remain caricatures of our precursor Xerxes. Was it not he who promised by edict a reward to anyone who could invent a new pleasure? — That was the most modern gesture of antiquity.
IV
The more risks a mind runs, the more it experiences the need to appear superficial, to assume an air of frivolity, and to multiply misunderstandings on its own account.
After thirty, one should be no more interested in events than an astronomer in gossip.
Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.
With age, it is not so much our intellectual faculties which diminish as that power to despair of which, in youth, we could appreciate neither the charm nor the absurdity.
What a pity that to reach God we must pass through faith!
Life — that style pompier of matter.
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
However patiently one intoxicates oneself, impossible to achieve the assurance of that asylum-Croesus who said: “To be at peace, I have bought myself all air, and made it my personal property.”
Our embarrassment in the presence of a ridiculous man derives from the fact that we cannot imagine him on his deathbed.
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?
Bilious minds? Those who revenge themselves on their thoughts for the gaiety they lavish on their transactions with others.
I knew nothing about her; our encounter nonetheless took the most macabre turn: I spoke to her of the sea, of a certain commentary on Ecclesiastes. And imagine my stupefaction when, after my tirade on the hysteria of the waves, she produced this remark: “Self-pity is not a good thing.”
Woe to the unbeliever who, confronting his insomnias, possesses only a limited stock of prayers!
Is it no more than chance that all those who broadened my views of death were society’s dregs?
For the madman, any scapegoat will do. He endures his defeats as an accuser; objects striking him as culpable as human beings, he assaults whatever and whomever he pleases; delirium is an expanding economy; — limited to larger discriminations, we fall back on our defeats, we cling to them, failing to find their cause or their sustenance outside ourselves; common sense compels us to a closed economy, to the autarky of failure.
“It ill becomes you,” you informed me, “to keep pestiferating against the order of things.”
“Can I help it if I am only a parvenu of neurosis, a Job in search of a leprosy, a trumpery Buddha, a lost and lazy Scyth?”
Sighs and satires seem to me equally valid. Whether I read a lampoon or an ars moriendi, everything there is true … With the unconstraint of pity, I pore over the truths and identify myself with the words.
“Thou shalt be objective!” — curse of the nihilist who believes in everything!
At the apogee of our disgusts, a rat seems to have crept into our brain to dream there.
It is not the precepts of Stoicism which will show us the utility of affronts or the seduction of catastrophes. The manuals of insensibility are all too reasonable. But if each man were to make his little experiment as a bum! To dress in rags, post yourself at the crossroads, to extend your palm to the passersby, to suffer their contempt or thank them for their coin — now there’s a discipline! Or to venture into the street and insult strangers, to endure their beatings …
For a long time I frequented courtrooms solely to contemplate habitual criminals, their superiority to the laws, their readiness for ruin. And yet they are pitiful compared to the whores, to the ease those women show in the dock. So much detachment is … disconcerting; no amour-propre whatever; insults draw no blood; no adjective is wounding. Their cynicism is the form of their honesty. A girl of seventeen, majestically frightful, replies to the judge trying to wrest a promise to keep off the sidewalks: “I can’t promise you that, Your Honor.”
One measures one’s own strength only in humiliation. In order to console ourselves for the shames we have not known, we would have to inflict them upon ourselves, spit in the mirror, waiting for the public to honor us with its saliva. God preserve us from a distinguished fate!
I have so fondled the notion of fatality, nourished it at the cost of such great sacrifices, that it has finally made itself incarnate: once an abstraction, here it is, palpitating before me and crushing me with all the life I have given it.
Religion
If I believed in God, my fatuousness would be limitless; I would walk naked in the streets …
So utterly have the saints resorted to the facility of paradox that it is impossible not to cite them in the salons.
When one is devoured by such an appetite for suffering that to satisfy it would take thousands of existences, we realize out of what hell must have arisen the notion of transmigration.
Outside of matter, all is music; God Himself is merely a sonorous hallucination.
Pursuing the antecedents of a sigh can lead us to the moment before — as to the sixth day of Creation.
The organ is the one instrument that makes us understand how eternity can develop.
Those nights when one can advance no further toward God, when one has traversed Him in all directions, when one has worn Him out with trampling — those nights from which one emerges with the notion of casting Him on the junk heap …, of enriching the world with one more piece of rubbish.
Without the vigilance of irony, how easy it would be to found a religion! Merely allow the gawkers to collect around our loquacious trances.
It is not God, it is Grief which enjoys the advantages of ubiquity.
In the crucial ordeals, a cigarette is more effective help than the Gospels.
Suso tells how he took a stylet and cut the name of Jesus into his flesh, right above his heart. He did not bleed in vain: sometime afterward, a light emanated from his wound.
Had I a greater faith in my incredulity, could I not, inscribing another name in my flesh, the name of the Adversary, serve him a
s a luminous sign!
I sought a standing in Time; it was uninhabitable. When I turned to Eternity, I lost my footing altogether.
A moment comes when each man says to himself, “Either God or me,” and engages in a combat from which both emerge diminished.
A man’s secret coincides with the sufferings he craves.
Knowing no more, with regard to religious experience, than the qualms of erudition, the moderns weigh the Absolute, study its varieties, and save their thrills for myths — those intoxications of an historical consciousness. Having ceased praying, we find fault with prayer. No more exclamations; nothing but theories. Religion boycotts faith. In the past, with love or hatred, we ventured into God, Who, from the inexhaustible Nothing He once was, is now — to the great despair of mystics and atheists — no more than a problem.
All Gall Is Divided_The Aphorisms of A Legendary Iconoclast Page 4