26/02/2014 16:28
Even though God did not exist, Religion would be none the less holy and divine.
God is the sole being who has no need to exist in order to reign.
That which is created by the Mind is more living than Matter.
I believe I have already set down in my notes that Love greatly resembles an application of torture or a surgical operation. But this idea can be developed, and in the most ironic manner. For even when two lovers love passionately and are full of mutual desire, one of the two will always be cooler or less self-abandoned than the other. He or she is the surgeon or executioner; the other, the patient or victim.
Music excavates Heaven.
Life has but one true charm: the charm of gambling. But what if we are indifferent to gain or loss?
Nations like families only produce great men in spite of themselves. They make every effort not to produce them. And thus the great man has need, if he is to exist, of a power of attack greater than the power of resistance developed by several millions of individuals.
There are some skins as hard as tortoise shell against which scorn has no power.
Are there mathematical lunacies and madmen who believe that two and two make three? In other words, can hallucination invade the realms of pure reason if the words do not cry out (at being joined together)? If, when a man has fallen into habits of idleness, of day-dreaming and of sloth, putting off his most important duties continually till the morrow, another man were to wake him up one morning with heavy blows of a whip and were to whip him unmercifully, until he who was unable to work for pleasure worked now for fear — would not that man, the chastiser, be his benefactor and truest friend?
That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity, that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.
People tell me that I am thirty, but if I have lived three minutes in one . . . am I not ninety years old?
