Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.
The more a man cultivates the arts, the less he ⟨gets hard⟩.
An increasingly perceptible divorce takes place between the mind and the brute.
Only the brute ⟨gets hard⟩ properly, and fucking is the lyricism of the people.
⟨To fuck⟩ is to aspire to enter another, and the artist never leaves himself.
I have forgotten that slut’s name... Ah! well! I shall remember it at the Last Judgment.
Music gives the idea of space.
All the arts do, more or less; since they are number, and number is a translation of space.
To want, every day, to be the greatest of men!
As a child, I wanted to be now pope, but a military pope, now an actor.
Pleasures I drew from these two hallucinations.
Even as a small child, I felt two contradictory feelings in my heart: horror of life and ecstasy of life. That is indeed the mark of a nervous idler.
Nations have great men only in spite of themselves.
Concerning the actor and my childhood dreams, a chapter on what constitutes, in the human soul, the actor’s calling, the actor’s fame, the actor’s art, and his position in the world.
Legouvé’s theory. Is Legouvé a deadpan joker, a Swift, who has tried to see whether France could swallow a new absurdity?
His choice. Good in the sense that Samson is not an actor.
On the true greatness of pariahs.
Perhaps virtue even harms the talents of pariahs.
Commerce is, by its very nature, satanic. Commerce means lending and repayment, lending with the unspoken understanding: Give me back more than I give you.
The mind of every merchant is completely corrupted.
Commerce is natural, and therefore infamous.
The least infamous of all merchants is the one who says: ‘Let us be virtuous so as to make much more money than the fools who are vicious.’
For the merchant, honesty itself is a speculation for profit.
Commerce is satanic because it is one of the forms of selfishness, and the lowest, and the vilest.
When Jesus Christ says:
‘Blessed are those who hunger, for they shall be filled!’ Jesus Christ is making a calculation of probabilities.
The world runs only through misunderstanding.
It is through universal misunderstanding that everyone agrees.
For if, by misfortune, we understood one another, we could never agree.
The man of wit, who will never agree with anyone, must apply himself to enjoying the conversation of imbeciles and the reading of bad books. He will draw bitter pleasures from them that will amply compensate for his weariness.
Any public official, a minister, a theatre or newspaper director, may sometimes be worthy of esteem; but they are never divine. They are persons without personality, beings without originality, born for office. That is, for public servitude.
God and his depth. — One may have wit and seek in God the accomplice and friend who are always missing. God is the eternal confidant in this tragedy of which each of us is the hero. There may be usurers and murderers who say to God: ‘Lord, let my next undertaking succeed!’ But the prayer of these vile people does not spoil the honour and pleasure of mine.
Every idea is, in itself, endowed with immortal life, like a person.
Every created form, even one created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter; and molecules are not what constitutes form.
Anecdotes about Émile Douay and Constantin Guys destroying, or rather believing they were destroying, their works.
It is impossible to look through any newspaper, from any day, or any month, or any year, without finding, in every line, signs of the most appalling human perversity, alongside the most astonishing boasts of probity, goodness, charity, and the most brazen assertions about progress and civilisation.
Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a fabric of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, indecencies, tortures, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, crimes of individuals, an intoxication of universal atrocity.
And it is with this disgusting apéritif that civilised man accompanies his meal each morning. Everything in this world sweats crime: the newspaper, the wall, and the face of man.
I cannot understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.
The power of the amulet demonstrated by philosophy. Pierced coins, talismans, each person’s keepsakes.
Treatise on moral dynamics. On the power of the sacraments.
From childhood, an inclination towards mystical feeling. My conversations with God.