Vol. XI, p. 242
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works
Context: When death comes, it does not ask your permission; it comes and takes you; it destroys you on the spot. In the same way, can you totally drop hate, envy, pride of possession, attachment to beliefs, to opinions, to ideas, to a particular way of thinking? Can you drop all that in an instant? There is no “how to drop it”, because that is only another form of continuity. To drop opinion, belief, attachment, greed, or envy is to die — to die every day, every moment. If there is the coming to an end of all ambition from moment to moment, then you will know the extraordinary state of being nothing, of coming to the abyss of an eternal movement, as it were, and dropping over the edge — which is death. I want to know all about death, because death may be reality; it may be what we call God — that most extraordinary something that lives and moves and yet has no beginning and no end.
“Since the end of the period of belief, leaders exalt every defect, every kind of sadism, and gain all the more through their vices: vanity, ambition, war, death in a word.”
16
Mea culpa; suivi de la vie et l'oeuvre de Semmelweis (1937)
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Louis-ferdinand Céline 88
French writer 1894–1961Related quotes
“It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.”
“The Finder” (p. 56)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)
Implosion Magazine, No. 6, p. 29 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine
1963, UN speech
Context: The task of building the peace lies with the leaders of every nation, large and small. For the great powers have no monopoly on conflict or ambition. The cold war is not the only expression of tension in this world — and the nuclear race is not the only arms race. Even little wars are dangerous in a nuclear world. The long labor of peace is an undertaking for every nation — and in this effort none of us can remain unaligned. To this goal none can be uncommitted.
"The Power of a State Developed by Mental Culture", an address to the Mercantile Library Association (18 November 1844), published in The Works of Rufus Choate : Memoir, Lectures and Addresses (1862), edited by Samuel Gilman Brown.
“vanity, like all social vices, craves for novelty;”
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)