Quotes from book

A Short History of Decay

“Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.”

“But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...”

“I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering.”

“What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.”

“Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.”

“Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.”

“I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.”

“Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.”

“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.”

“The universal view melts things into a blur.”

“History proves nothing because it contains everything.”

“Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.”

“So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.”

“When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.”

“History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.”

“In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.”

“Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.”

“Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.”

“Try to be free: you will die of hunger.”