Quote collection
464 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I had dreamed my life for nearly fifty years (I am about to be fifty-nine). But, you see, there are two tones in Les Mats: the echo of this condemnation and a mitigation of that severity."
"When my relations with the Communist Party gave me the necessary perspective I decided to write my autobiography. I wanted to show how a man can pass from literature held sacred to action which nevertheless remains that of an intellectual."
"Man is always a wizard to man, and the social world is at first magical."
"Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world."
"Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being."
"All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure."
"To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe."
"How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?"
"Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself."
"I will take it all: tongs, molten lead, prongs, garrotes, all that burns, all that tears, I want to truly suffer. Better one hundred bites, better the whip, vitriol, than this suffering in the head, this ghost of suffering which grazes and caresses and never hurts enough."
"I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books."
"For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, just notes, a myriad tiny tremors. The notes know no rest, an inflexibleorder gives birth to them then destroys them, without ever leaving them the chance to recuperate and exist for themselves.... I would like to hole them back, but I know that, if I succeeded in stooping one, there would only remain in may hand a corrupt and languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even want that death: I know of few more bitter or intense impressions."
"Philosophy appears to some people as a homogenous milieu: there thoughts are born and die, there systems are built, and there, in turn, they collapse. Others take Philosophy for a specific attitude which we can freely adopt at will. Still others see it as a determined segment of culture. In our view Philosophy does not exist."
"Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her."
"I discovered suddenly that alienation, exploitation of man by man, under-nourishment, relegated to the background metaphysical evil which is a luxury."
"Take [Stéphane] Mallarme. I hold him to be the greatest of French poets, and I have taken some time to understand him !"
"In order to make myself recognized by the Other, I must risk my own life. To risk one's life, in fact, is to reveal oneself as not-bound to the objective form or to any determined existence — as not-bound to life."
"If I relegate impossible Salvation to the prop room, what remains? A whole man, composed of all men and as good as all of them and no better than any."
"On my way to the office in the morning, there are, in front of me, behind me, other men going to their jobs. I see them; if I dared, I would smile at them. I think to myself that I am a socialist, that they are the purpose of my life, of my efforts and that they do not know it yet."
"I have seen children dying of hunger. Over against a dying child La Nausee cannot act as a counterweight."