Great Throughts Treasury

"Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration."

"Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment."

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

"Trees are massacred, houses go up - faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth."

"True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats."

"Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise."

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

"Unlike Job, I have not cursed the day I was born; all the other days, on the contrary, I have covered with my anathemas."

"Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism."

"We are all secularized anarchists today."

"Under each formula lies a corpse."

"We are afraid of the enormity of the possible."

"We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves."

"We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job..."

"We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us."

"We must censure the later Nietzsche for a panting excess in the writing, the absence of rests."

"We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage."

"We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering"

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

"We change ideas like neckties."

"We derive our vitality from our store of madness."

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

"We inhabit a language rather than a country."

"We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy."

"Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence."

"We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves."

"What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots."

"What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!"

"We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune."

"What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation."

"What are you waiting for in order to give up?"

"What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?"

"What is pity but the vice of kindness."

"What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?"

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

"What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist."

"What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures."

"What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?"

"What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?"

"What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough."

"When we discern the unreality of everything, we ourselves become unreal, we begin to survive ourselves, however powerful our vitality, however imperious our instincts. But they are no longer anything but false instincts, and false vitality."

"Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?"

"When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it."

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

"When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings."

"Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?"

"Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire."

"Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave."

"Won over by solitude, yet he remains in the world: a stylite without a pillar."

"Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea."