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Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine.
God is the only being who does not even need to exist in order to reign.
What the mind creates is more alive than matter.
Love is a taste for prostitution. There is not even a noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to prostitution.
At a performance, at a ball, everyone takes pleasure in everyone else.
What is art? Prostitution.
The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of the delight in the multiplication of number.
Everything is number. Number is in everything. Number is in the individual. Intoxication is a number.
In a mature man, a taste for productive concentration must replace a taste for dissipation.
Love may spring from a generous feeling: a taste for prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by a taste for ownership.
Love wants to go outside itself, to merge with its victim as the victor with the vanquished, and yet to retain the privileges of a conqueror.
The sensual pleasures of the man who keeps a mistress partake of both the angel and the property owner. Charity and ferocity. They are even independent of sex, beauty, and animal kind.
The green darkness on damp evenings in the warm season.
Immense depth of thought in common expressions, holes dug by generations of ants.
Anecdote of the Hunter, concerning the intimate connection between ferocity and love.
Flares. — On the femininity of the Church as the reason for its omnipotence.
On the colour violet (love restrained, mysterious, veiled, the colour of a canoness).
The priest is immense because he makes people believe in a host of astonishing things.
That the Church should want to do everything and be everything is a law of the human mind.
Peoples worship authority.
Priests are the servants and the sectaries of the imagination.
The throne and the altar, a revolutionary maxim.
E. G. or the Seductive Adventuress.
Religious intoxication of great cities.
Pantheism. I am everyone; everyone is me.
Flares. — I believe I have already written in my notes that love closely resembled torture or a surgical operation. But this idea can be developed in the bitterest way. Even if the two lovers were deeply in love and filled with mutual desire, one of the two will always be calmer, or less possessed, than the other. That one, he or she, is the operator or the executioner; the other is the subject, the victim. Do you hear those sighs, preludes to a tragedy of dishonour, those moans, those cries, those death rattles? Who has not uttered them, who has not irresistibly wrung them from another? And what worse do you find in judicial torture administered by meticulous torturers? Those upturned sleepwalker’s eyes, those limbs whose muscles stand out and stiffen as though under the action of a galvanic battery: intoxication, delirium, opium, in their most violent effects, will certainly not give you examples so dreadful, so strange. And the human face, which Ovid believed was fashioned to reflect the stars, now expresses only mad ferocity, or relaxes into a kind of death. For I would certainly think it sacrilege to apply the word ‘ecstasy’ to this kind of disintegration.
— A dreadful game in which one of the players must lose command of himself!
Once, in my presence, someone asked what constituted the greatest pleasure of love. Someone naturally answered: receiving, and another: giving oneself. — This one said: a pleasure of pride; — and that one: a delight of humility. All those filthy fellows spoke like The Imitation of Christ. — Finally, there was an impudent utopian who maintained that the greatest pleasure of love was to produce citizens for the fatherland.
I say: the sole and supreme sensual pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing evil. And man and woman know from birth that all sensual pleasure is found in evil.
Plan. Flares. Projects. — The comédia in Silvestre’s manner. | Barbora and the Sheep.
Chenavard has created a superhuman type.
My vow to Levaillant.
Preface, a mixture of mysticism and playfulness.
Dreams and a theory of the Dream in Swedenborg’s manner.
Campbell’s thought (The Conduct of Life).
Concentration.
Power of the fixed idea.
Absolute frankness, a means to originality.
To recount comic things pompously…
Flares. Suggestions. — When a man takes to his bed, almost all his friends secretly wish to see him die: some to establish that his health was poorer than theirs; others in the disinterested hope of studying a death agony.
Arabesque drawing is the most spiritualist kind of drawing.
Flares. Suggestions. — The man of letters sets capital in motion and gives a taste for intellectual gymnastics.
Arabesque drawing is the most ideal of all.
We love women in proportion to how alien they are to us. To love intelligent women is a pederast’s pleasure. Thus bestiality excludes pederasty.
The spirit of buffoonery need not exclude charity, but that is rare.
Enthusiasm directed at anything other than abstractions is a sign of weakness and disease.
Thinness is more naked, more indecent than fatness.
Tragic sky. — An epithet of an abstract order applied to a material being.
Man drinks light along with the atmosphere. Thus the people are right to say that the night air is unhealthy for work.
The people are born worshippers of fire.
Fireworks, fires, arsonists.
If one imagines a born worshipper of fire, a born Parsi, one can create a short story…
Mistakes concerning faces result from the real image being eclipsed by the hallucination born of it.
So learn the pleasures of a harsh life, and pray, pray without ceasing. Prayer is a reservoir of strength. (Altar of the will. — Moral dynamics. — The Sorcery of the Sacraments. — Hygiene of the soul.)
Music hollows out the sky.
Jean-Jacques said that he never entered a café without a certain emotion. For a timid nature, a theatre’s ticket inspection desk somewhat resembles the tribunal of the Underworld.
Life has only one true charm: the charm of the Game. But what if we are indifferent to winning or losing?
Suggestions. Flares. — Nations have great men only in spite of themselves, — like families. They make every effort to have none. And so, in order to exist, a great man needs an attacking force greater than the resisting force developed by millions of individuals.
Of sleep, the sinister adventure of every night, one may say that men fall asleep each day with a boldness that would be incomprehensible if we did not know it was the result of ignorance of the danger.
There are skins like armour against which contempt is no longer revenge.
Many friends, many gloves. Those who loved me were despised people, I would even say despicable, if I cared to flatter respectable people.
Girardin speaking Latin! And the beasts spoke.
It was fitting for an unbelieving Society to send Robert Houdin among the Arabs to turn them away from miracles.