Gravity and Grace

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

— Gravity and Grace

As regards temptations, we must follow the example of the truly chaste woman who, when the seducer speaks to her, makes no answer and pretends not to hear him.

— Gravity and Grace

In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention. If we could be attentive to the same degree in the presence of a human being, ...

— Gravity and Grace

The recognition of wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something.

— Gravity and Grace

Extreme purity can contemplate both the pure and the impure; impurity can do neither: the pure frightens it, the impure absorbs it. It has to have a mixture.

— Gravity and Grace

When a main trains a dog to perform tricks he does not beat it for the sake of beating it, but in order to train it, and with this in view he only hits it when it fails to carry out a trick. If he beats it without any method he ends by making it unfit for any training, and that is what the wrong sort of asceticism does.

— Gravity and Grace

The source of my difficulties lies in the fact that, through exhaustion and an absence of vital energy, I am below the level of normal activity. And if something takes me and raises me up I am lifted above it. When such moments come it would seem to me a calamity to waste them in ordinary activities. ... I could consent to the anomaly of behavior resulting from this; but I know, or I believe I know, that I should not do so. It involves crimes of omission towards others.

— Gravity and Grace

The Greeks believed that only truth was suitable for divine things—not error nor approximations. The divine character of anything made them more exacting with regard to accuracy. We do precisely the opposite.

— Gravity and Grace

The use of reason makes things transparent to the mind. We do not, however, see what is transparent. We see that which is opaque through the transparent—the opaque which was hidden when the transparent was not transparent. ... Reason should be employed only to bring us to the true mysteries, the true undemonstrables, which are reality. The uncomprehended hides the incomprehensible and should on this account be eliminated.

— Gravity and Grace

Justice. To be ready to admit that another person is something ... completely different from what we read in him.

— Gravity and Grace

We read, but also we are read by, others. Interferences in these readings. Forcing someone to read himself as we read him (slavery). Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves (conquest).

— Gravity and Grace

To love our neighbour as ourselves does not mean that we should love all people equally, for I do not have an equal love for all the modes of existence of myself. Nor does it mean that we should never make them suffer, for I do not refuse to make myself suffer.

— Gravity and Grace

We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe.

— Gravity and Grace

It is better to say, ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly’.

— Gravity and Grace

As collective thought cannot exist as thought, it passes into things (signs, machines ...). Hence the paradox: it is the thing which thinks and the man who is reduced to the state of a thing.

— Gravity and Grace

Our science is collective like our technics. ... We inherit not only results but methods which we do not understand.

— Gravity and Grace

The spirit, overcome by the weight of quantity, has no longer any other criterion than efficiency.

— Gravity and Grace

Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.

— Gravity and Grace

Man is a slave in so far as between action and its effect, between effort and the finished work, there is the interference of alien wills.

— Gravity and Grace

To be in direct contact with nature and not with men is the only discipline. To be dependent on an alien will is to be a slave. This, however, is the fate of all men. The slave is dependent on the master and the master on the slave. This is a situation which makes us either servile or tyrannical or both at once (omnia serviliter pro dominatione) . On the contrary, when we are face to face with inert nature our only resource is to think.

— Gravity and Grace

The notion of oppression is, in short, a stupidity: one has only to read the Iliad. And the notion of an oppressive class is even more stupid. We can only speak of an oppressive structure of society.

— Gravity and Grace

To have to deal directly with things frees the spirit. To have to deal directly with men debases us if we are dependent on them, whether this dependence be in the form of submission or command.

— Gravity and Grace

Revolt, if it does not immediately pass into definite and effective action, is always changed into its opposite through the feeling of utter impotence which results from it. In other words the chief support of the oppressor lies precisely in the unavailing revolt of the oppressed.

— Gravity and Grace

The only way to preserve our dignity when submission is forced upon us is to consider our chief as a thing.

— Gravity and Grace

The collective is the object of all idolatry.

— Gravity and Grace

That which we want is the absolute good. That which is within our reach is the good which is correlated to evil. We betake ourselves of it by mistake, like the prince who starts to make love to the maid instead of the mistress.

— Gravity and Grace

It is the social which throws the color of the absolute over the relative.

— Gravity and Grace

He who is above social life returns to it when he wishes, not so he who is below.

— Gravity and Grace

The power of the social element. Agreement between several men brings with it a feeling of reality. It brings with it also a sense of duty. Divergence, where this agreement is concerned, appears as a sin. Hence all returns to the fold are possible. The state of conformity is an imitation of grace.

— Gravity and Grace

Nothing seems evil to those who serve it except failure in its service.

— Gravity and Grace

It is impossible for an order which is higher and therefore infinitely above another to be represented in it except by something infinitely small. A grain of mustard seed, an instant mirroring eternity, etc.

— Gravity and Grace

A future which is completely impossible, like the ideal of the Spanish anarchists, degrades us far less and differs far less from the eternal than a possible future. It does not even degrade us at all, except through the illusion of its possibility. If it is conceived of as impossible, it transports us into the eternal.

— Gravity and Grace

We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist—or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.

— Gravity and Grace

The constant illusion of Revolution consists in believing that the victims of force, being innocent of the outrages that are committed, will use force justly if it is put into their hands.

— Gravity and Grace

We have to turn all our disgust into a disgust for ourselves.

— Gravity and Grace

To strive from necessity and not for some good—driven not drawn—in order to maintain our existence just as it is—that is always slavery.

— Gravity and Grace

Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem.

— Gravity and Grace

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

— Gravity and Grace

May the eternal light give, not a reason for living and working, but a sense of completeness which makes the search for any such reason unnecessary.

— Gravity and Grace

What evil violates is not goodness, for goodness is inviolate; only a degraded good can be violated.

— Gravity and Grace

All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to fight—the prejudice that everything sexual is vile.

— Gravity and Grace

We do not have to acquire humility. There is humility in us—only we humiliate ourselves before false gods.

— Gravity and Grace

Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.

— Gravity and Grace

Everything which is vile or second-rate in us revolts against purity and needs, in order to save its own life, to soil this purity.

— Gravity and Grace

The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change.

— Gravity and Grace

To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil.

— Gravity and Grace

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.

— Gravity and Grace

The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.

— Gravity and Grace

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.

— Gravity and Grace

To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice.

— Gravity and Grace

Monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is equivalent. ... It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. A host of women (Don Juan) or of men (Célimène), etc.

— Gravity and Grace

A certain inferior kind of virtue is good’s degraded image, of which we have to repent, and of which it is more difficult to repent than evil—The Pharisee and the Publican.

— Gravity and Grace

That which is the direct opposite of an evil never belongs to the order of higher good. It is often scarcely any higher than evil! Examples: theft and the bourgeois respect for property, adultery and the ‘respectable woman,’ the savings bank and waste, lying and ‘sincerity.’

— Gravity and Grace

Good considered on the level of evil and measured against it as one opposite against another is good of the penal code order. Above there is a good which, in a sense, bears more resemblance to evil than to this low form of good.

— Gravity and Grace

When we are the victims of illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but a reality. It is the same perhaps with evil. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

— Gravity and Grace

Most people have a sense of duty about doing certain things that are bad and others that are good. The same man feels it to be a duty to sell for the highest price he can and not to steal, etc. Good for such people is on the level of evil, it is a good without light.

— Gravity and Grace

The false God changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering.

— Gravity and Grace

The crime which is latent in us, we must inflict on ourselves.

— Gravity and Grace

The most criminal weakness is infinitely less dangerous than the very slightest treason, even thought this should be confined to a purely inward movement of thought lasting no more than an instant.

— Gravity and Grace

We believe that thought alone does not commit us in any way, but it alone commits us, and license of thought includes all license. Not to think about a thing—supreme faculty.

— Gravity and Grace

Two conceptions of hell: the ordinary one (suffering without consolation); mine (false beatitude, mistakenly thinking oneself to be in paradise).

— Gravity and Grace

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

— Gravity and Grace

Time leads us whither we do no wish to go.

— Gravity and Grace

To say that the world is not worth anything, that life is of no value, and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?

— Gravity and Grace

Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband.

— Gravity and Grace

Leaves and fruit are a waste of energy if our only wish is to rise.

— Gravity and Grace

In order that we should realize the distance between ourselves and God it was necessary that God should be a crucified slave. For we do not realize distance except in the downward direction.

— Gravity and Grace

To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight.

— Gravity and Grace

God gives himself to men either as powerful or as perfect—it is for them to choose.

— Gravity and Grace

A lever. We lower when we want to lift. In the same way, “He who humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

— Gravity and Grace

We must be like the father in heaven who does not judge: by him beings judge themselves. We must let all beings come to us, and leave them to judge themselves. We must be a balance.

— Gravity and Grace

Bad union of opposites (bad because fallacious) is that which is achieved on the same plane as the opposites. Thus the granting of domination to the oppressed. In this way we do not get free from the oppression-domination cycle.

— Gravity and Grace

The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul—like pincers to catch hold of God.

— Gravity and Grace

Method of investigation: as soon as we have thought something, try to see in what way the contrary is true.

— Gravity and Grace

The sword affords deliverance (whether through its handle or its point) from the intolerable weight of our obligation.

— Gravity and Grace

The most commonplace truth when it floods the whole soul is like a revelation.

— Gravity and Grace

The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another phenomenon die to horror of the void. We do not want to have lost our labour. The hear of the chase. We must not want to find: as in the case of excessive devotion, we become dependent on the object of our efforts. We need an outward reward which chance sometimes provides and which we are ready to accept at the price of a deformation of truth..

— Gravity and Grace

It is only effort without desire (not attached to an object) which infallibly contains a reward.

— Gravity and Grace

Love is the teacher of gods and men, for no one learns without desiring to learn.

— Gravity and Grace