
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.”
March 1937
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.”
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek, presumably formulation by Žižek (see below).
Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah; strict English with cognate terms and glosses:
Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres
The old world is dying, the new world tardy (slow) to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.
“ Mongo Beti, une conscience noire, africaine, universelle http://www.liberationafrique.org/imprimersans.php3?id_article=16&nom_site=Lib%C3%A9ration”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, août 2002 ( archive https://web.archive.org/web/20160304061734/http://www.liberationafrique.org/imprimersans.php3?id_article=16&nom_site=Lib%C3%A9ration, 2016-03-04)
“Mongo Beti, a Black, African, Universal Conscience”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, August 2002
Collected in: Remember Mongo Beti, Ambroise Kom, 2003, p. 149 https://books.google.com/books?id=6YgdAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Le+vieux+monde+se+meurt,+le+nouveau+monde+tarde+%C3%A0+appara%C3%AEtre+et+dans+ce+clair-obscur+surgissent+les+monstres%22.
Original, with literal English translation (see above):
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
Similar sentiments are widespread in revolutionary rhetoric; see: No, Žižek did not attribute a Goebbels quote to Gramsci http://thecharnelhouse.org/2015/07/03/no-zizek-did-not-attribute-a-goebbels-quote-to-gramsci/, Ross Wolfe, 2015-07-03
Misattributed
Source: Selections from the Prison Notebooks
“To be born is not to come into the world. To be born is to come into life.”
Books on Religion and Christianity, I am the Truth. Toward a philosophy of Christianity (1996)
Original: (fr) Naître, ce n’est pas venir dans le monde. Naître, c’est venir dans la vie.
Michel Henry, C'est moi la Vérité, éd. du Seuil, 1996, p. 79
“The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world.”
Act IV
Dantons Tod (Danton's Death) (1835)
“We are born into this world unarmed - our mind is our only weapon.”
Source: Atlas Shrugged