To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.
Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.
To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.
Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
Hungarian Language — savage it may be but of a beauty that has nothing human about it, with sonorities of another universe, powerful and corrosive, appropriate to prayer, to groans and to tears, risen out of hell to perpetuate its accent and its aura…words of nectar and cyanide.
I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?
We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
The universal view melts things into a blur.
If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.
The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
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