Anathemas and Admirations (57 page)

In a work admirably translated from English, just one blemish:
“les abîmes du scepticism,”
for which the translator should have supplied
doute,
for in French the word
skepticism
has a nuance of dilettantism, even frivolity, not to be associated with the notion of the abyss.

A taste for formula goes along with a weakness for definitions, for whatever has least relation to reality.

Everything that can be classified is perishable. Only what is susceptible to several interpretations endures.

To confront the blank page — what a Waterloo prospect!

In conversation with someone, whatever his merits may be, never forget for a moment that in his profound reactions he is no different from ordinary mortals. For discretion’s sake, you must handle him carefully, for like anyone else, he will not tolerate frankness, direct cause of almost all quarrels and grudges.

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

We haven’t a single letter of Shakespeare’s. Didn’t he write any? One would have liked to hear Hamlet complain about his mail.

The eminent virtue of calumny is that it produces a vacuum around you without your having to raise a finger.

Desperate disgust in the presence of a crowd, whether high-spirited or sullen.

Everything is in decline, and always has been. Once this diagnosis is well established, you can utter any enormity; you are even obliged to.

If you are almost always overcome by events, it is because you need merely wait in order to realize that you have been guilty of naïveté.

The passion for music is in itself an admission. We know more about a stranger who abandons himself to it than about someone indifferent to it whom we deal with every day.

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion.