writer, aphorist, playwright, chemist, essayist
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1905 – 1994
The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.
I was never drawn to experiment with language; I take note of such experiments, but avoid them in my own writing. The reason is that the substance of life claims me completely. To indulge in linguistic experiments is to ignore the greater part of this substance, leaving all but a tiny portion untouched and unused, as if a musician were to ceaselessly play an instrument with his little finger only.
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages
Is there still a possibility of public truth?Ideally, you should use only words which you have filled with new meaning.
I hate judgments that only crush and don’t transform.
One who, alone, would be unconquerable. But he weakens himself with allegiances.
I can’t be twenty-two again. I can’t subject myself to the same compulsion that, at the time, appeared to me as freedom and gave me wings.
One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others.
Whenever the truth threatens, he hides behind a thought.
I love writers who limit themselves, who write beneath their intelligence.
The story of your youth must not turn into a catalog of what became important in your later life. It must also contain the dissipation, the failure, and the waste.
You can tirelessly keep on reading the same author, revere, admire, praise him, exalt him to the skies, know and recite each of his sentences by heart, and yet remain completely unaffected by him, as if he had never demanded anything of you and not said anything at all.
A mind, lean in its own language. In others, it gets fat.
Montaigne the I-sayer. “I” as space, not as position.
You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas—better to write down what refutes and weakens them!
You don’t have to know a philosopher’s every syllable to know why he rubs you the wrong way. You may know it best after a few of his sentences, and les and less well after that. The important thing is to see his web and move away before you tear it.
You need the rhetoric of others, the aversion it inspires, in order to find the way out of your own.
The once-seen does not exist yet. The always seen no longer exists.
When I leaf through Fackel issues of my slave years, I am seized by horror. Anyone released from bondage must feel like this.
It amazes me how a person to whom literature means anything can take it up as an object of study.
All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
“He is a lesser figure than X”—how it pleases an Englishman to say that! Never suspecting what basement that would put him in, a wood louse.
One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.
I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for all the years, more attentive, more unrelenting, expectant and ready, as though he still had to make up his mind about most things and must not disregard anything.
He sometimes tells himself that there is nothing more to be said, simply because he won’t get around to saying it.—How contemptible!
Everything you rejected and pushed aside—take it up again.
“Life experience” does not amount to very much and could be learned from novels alone, e.g., from Balzac, without any help from life.
If one has lived long enough, there is danger of succumbing to the word “God” merely because it was always there.
There is something impure in the laments about the dangers of our time, as if they could serve to excuse our personal failure.
Nothing was better for you than humiliation, for there was nothing you felt more deeply.
His great holy books, which he does not know. They are so holy that he does not dare to open them.
I repulse death with all my strength. If I accepted it, I would be a murderer.
Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don’t be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper.
The unconscious, which those who always speak of it least possess.
Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past.
One should tell oneself how fruitful misunderstandings are. One shouldn’t despise them. One of the wisest people was a collector of misunderstandings.
When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak.
Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.