A Short History of Decay

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.

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.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police — and end by calling them in.

As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

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.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.

At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

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

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?

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

To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...

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

Nothing is indefensible — from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.

To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

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

A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.

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. . .

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.

Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.

But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?

His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

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

No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" — we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . .

Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

So it is that after each night, facing a new day, the impossible necessity of dealing with it fills us with dread; exiled in light as if the world had just started, inventing the sun, we flee from tears—just one of which would be enough to wash us out of time.

Society: an inferno of saviors!

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.

Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

Thought is as much a lie as love or faith.

Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

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.

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.

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