99 quotes
I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Two enemies — the same man divided.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" — That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)