I swear never to speak of things that I don’t know well, not to improvise for anything in the world, not to be unworthy of a subject that I treat, not to discredit myself in my own eyes.
(Oath sworn at the end of a conference with M., particularly superficial.)
January the 20th, 1960.
The French would be the happiest people on earth if vanity did not disturb their happiness.
Vanity is the way in which we atone for our happiness (vanity is the punishment for happiness).
Renouncing one’s ambitions often leads to regret for having renounced them; which is more serious than acting on them and cultivating them. Everything happens as if man were capable of anything, except attaining wisdom.
Horrible numbness, as if I were below the level of insensibility of an element and my spirit had expired. With rare exceptions, I live below myself, with the weight of culpability and great dishonor on my conscience. When I think of all my projects abandoned due to sloth or bad temper, I actually make myself out to be a worse deserter than I ever was.
As if Time were coagulated in my veins…
Reduce your hours to an audience with yourself, and even better with God. Banish men from your thoughts, so that nothing external comes to dishonor your solitude, leave to the clown the worry of having fellow men. Diminish the other for you, for he obliges you to play a role; eliminate gestures from your life, confine yourself to the essential.
To Write
— A commentary on Genesis
— On time: the problem of the autobiography.
Saint Augustine (G. Mish: Geschichte des Autobiographie).
— The experience of time.
Fame closes in on an author at the moment he has nothing more to say; it consecrates a cadaver.
Everyone is busy with his own game, as though he knew his destiny by heart.
The more a writer is original, the more he risks being dated and boring: as soon as people get accustomed to his tricks, he is finished. True originality is unconscious of means, and an author must be carried by his talent; instead of directing and exploiting it.
An ingenious mind flees its talent, meaning it invents it. Isn’t that the definition of a man of letters?
In a work, the horrible should elate; if it creates malaise, it is poor quality.
I only get along well with those who, without being believers, have gone through a religious crisis which has marked them for the rest of their days. Religion — as interior debate — is the only modality of piercing, of punching through the layer of appearances that separates us from the essential.
That “glorious delirium” of which Theresa of Avila speaks, to designate one of the phases of union with God, I have sometimes come near it… a long time ago, alas!
Irony, the privilege of wounded souls. Like one who evidences a secret crack in relief.
Irony, by itself, is a confession, or the mask that borrows pity from itself.
This terrible proverb: “When the sage ponders, the madman ponders as well…”