56 quotes
Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...
A Short History of Decay (1949)
I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" — we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . .
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?
A Short History of Decay (1949)
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
A Short History of Decay (1949)