Anathemas and Admirations (60 page)

To live in fear of being bored to death everywhere, even in God: this obsession with boredom imposes limits; in it I see the reason for my spiritual unfulfillment.

Between Epicurism and Stoicism, which are we to choose? I shift from one to the other and most often am faithful to both at once — which is my way of espousing the maxims Antiquity preferred to the swarming of dogmas.

It is to our inertia that we owe our rescue from the inflation into which more than one man falls out of an excess of vanity, labor, or talent. If it is not comforting, it is in any case flattering to tell ourselves that we shall die without having given our measure.

To have shouted one’s doubts from the rooftops, even while siding with that school of discretion which is skepticism.

The considerable service done us by pests, thieves of our time, who keep us from leaving behind a complete image of our capacities.

It is praiseworthy for us to love anything and anyone except our kind, precisely because they resemble ourselves. This phenomenon suffices to explain why history is what it is.

Most of our evils issue from a great distance, from this or that ancestor ruined by his excesses. We are punished for his dissipations: no need to drink, he will have drunk in our place. That hangover which so surprises us is the price we pay for his euphorias.

Thirty years of ecstasy at the altar of the Cigarette. Now, when I see others sacrifice to my former idol, I do not understand them, I regard them as unhinged or defective. If a “vice” we have conquered becomes alien to us to such a degree, how can we fail to be astounded by those we have not practiced?

In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.

The desire to work comes over me only when I have an appointment. I always go off feeling certain I am missing a unique opportunity to outdo myself.

“I cannot do without the things I care nothing for,” the Duchess du Maine liked to say. Frivolity, to this degree, is a prelude to renunciation.

If the Almighty could realize how burdensome the merest action is to me on some occasions, He would not fail, in an impulse of pity, to yield me His place.

Not knowing which way to turn, preferring a discontinuous reflection, image of time broken into pieces. . . .