Category: Quotes

The only thing is, she refuses to speak. In fact, she doesn't want to lie.

Bergman, from the notebooks to Persona

Dream 7: I’m drinking wine from a cracked glass. The wine runs down my arm and my legs. I vomit, pour more wine in the glass, drink, vomit, etc.

From an early age we are taught to translate the creatures around us -though they be toads that glisten or mica shining at noon – into clean surfaces on which we can project our dreams of total happiness. In this American capitalistic view the world is a kind of vast playground, with each object serving its purpose for pleasure. Who cares if what we normally call reality is forsaken?

[….] Entertaining this peril, these happy types really see only themselves. They colonise experience. They impose their imperialist egos onto the world.

[….] These types overly enamoured of security spend much of their energy trying to 'make permanent those experiences and joys which are only loveable because they are changing'. In attempting to make impermanent joys – dying roses, growing children – stable, these controlling sorts of people actually alienate themselves from what they most want to embrace.

[….] Performing the happy life is giving over to artifice. Enduring the sad existence is participating in life's vital rhythms. Pallid happiness is here hell, and melancholia, dark, is the way to earthly heaven.

[….] That's finally it; happy types ultimately don't live their own lives at all. They follow some prefabiricated script, some ten-step plan for bliss or some stairway to heaven.

[….] The problem is that these poor souls won't be aware of the source of their nervousness. They'll tend to blame others or the world, anything to keep intact the delusion that they're just find, thank you, anything to keep at bay the vicious fear eating at their hearts.

from Eric G. Wilson's Against Happiness

A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner….

[W]e soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; he has been affected with neuralgic complaints in his head and limbs, and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind….

I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen-labor and domestic life, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was…. He is a person of very gentlemanly instincts in every respect, save that he is a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen….

Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief.

It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wondering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us. —

Hawthorne in his notebooks, November 20 1856

May 13, 1992. It's must better if don't ask specific questions about his past. He seems suspicious of anything that requires precise answers. He likes to talk on general themes. Today I mentioned exile. His interest revived, he talked at great length. Exile has been a lifelong obsession of his. His goal in life, to become a stranger. He talked at length about the 'voluptuousness of exile', the exquisite pain of being from nowhere, a main theme in his work.

He expressed his great passion for Dostoevsky. Not only for his books, but especially for his personality and his life.

April 17, 1993. Today I called Simone from Bloomington. Cioran is very ill in the hospital. He fell, broke his hip, and they had to operate. He seems to have lost the will to live. He hangs his head and looks at Simone ith a dull expression. Refuses to eat, is in a great state of anxiety, twists himself in the chair, lashes out at the nurses and orderlies, was tied to his bed for being too violent. Premonition of madness, he quotes to her from Mihai Eminescu's 'Second Letter': 'the instruments are broken and the maestro's mad'.

May 12, 1993. Simone says that for many years now Cioran has stopped reading and writing, just sits in his room and rummages through his papers while she tried to keep up appearances in a lost battle. He had been aware of his condition and was infuriated by it. Once, after having begged him to take a bath, which he repeatedly refused, she went away crying. He came after her, embraced her and said, 'I'm a sick man, forgive me'. They had planned to commit suicide together, like the Koestlers, but then Cioran fell ill, and now it's too late.

May 13, 1993. Sixty years ago, in On the Heights of Despair, he described his condition with incredible prescience: it is not madness but the moments of lucidity in madness that are to be feared.

He ate a big dinner and seemed to be in a good mood, once in a while desperately trying to formulate one of his bon mots. What an irony: this sparkling conversationalist, who used to dine out on his verve, now deprived of words. His eyes start to twinkle, he opens his mouth to say something, starts up with a word or two and then stops, face darkening, closing up and collapsing into humself and his despair.

from Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's Searching for Cioran

Considering the overpowering forces of habit and the law, which continually pressured us to disperse, none of us could be sure we would still be there at the end of the week. Yet everything we would ever love was there. Time burned more intensely than elsewhere, and would soon run out. We felt the earth shake.

Suicide carried off many. 'Drink and the devil have done for the rest', as a song says.

Perhaps we might not have been quite so ruthless if we had found some already-initiated project that seemed to merit our support. But there was no such project. The only cause we supported we had to define and launch ourselves. There was nothing above us that we could respect.

Along the way many of us died or were taken prisoner; many others were wounded and permanently put out of action; and certain elements even let themselves slip to the rear out of lack of courage; but I believe I can say that our formation as a whole never swerved from its line until it plunged into the very core of destruction.

The sensation of the passing of time has always been vivid for me, and I have been attracted by it just as others are allured by dizzying heights or by water. In this sense I have loved my era, which has seen the end of all existing security and the dissolution of everything that was socially ordained. These are the pleasures that the practice of the greatest art would not have given me.

Guy Debord, from In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni

Because I am so cut off I naturally have an extraordinarily strong desire for a friend …

Wittgenstein in a letter, 1908

His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he sends in despair – he has just the sort of rage when he can't understand things that I have.

Russell on Wittgenstein, in a letter to Morell, 1912

… perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.

Russell on Wittgenstein in his Autobiography

We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.

Russell, speaking to Wittgenstein's sister, Hermine, 1912

He would, according to Russell, 'pace up and down my room like a wild beast for three hours in agitated silence'. Once, Russell asked: 'Are you thinking about logic or your sins?' 'Both', Wittgenstein replied, and continued his pacing.

Ray Monk, from whose biography all these quotations are taken.

… the year spent in Skjolden was possibly the most productive of his life. Years later he used to look back on it as the one time that he had had some thoughts that were enirely his own, when he had even 'brought to life new movements in thinking'. 'Then my mind was on fire!', he used to say.

Monk again, writing of Wittgenstein's time in Norway in 1913.

My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me – or else that I needn't live much longer.

… deep inside me there's a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person.

Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but how can I be a logician before I'm a human being? Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!

Wittgenstein to Russell, Xmas 1913

Worked the whole day. Stormed the problem in vain! But I would pour my blood before this fortress rather than march off empty-handed. The greatest difficulty lies in making secure fortresses already conquered. And as long as the whole city has not fallen one cannot feel completely secure in one of its fortifications.

letter, October 1914

My thoughts are tired. I am not seeing things freshly, but rather in a pedestrian, lifeless way. It is as if a flame had gone out and I must wait until it starts to burn again by itself.

letter, Jan 1915

Yesterday I was shot at. I was scared! I was afraid of death. I now have such a desire to live. And it is difficult to give up life when one enjoys it. This is precisely what 'sin' is, the unreasoning life, a false view of life. From time to time I become an animal. Then I can think of nothing but eating, drinking and sleeping. Terrible! And then I suffer like an animal too, without the possibility of internal salvation. I am then at the mercy of my appetites and aversions. Then an authentic life is unthinkable.

Diary entry 1916

I have continually thought of taking my own life, and the idea still haunts me sometimes. I have sunk to the lowest point. May you never be in that position! Shall I ever be able to raise myself up again?

Wittgenstein to Engelmann, May 1920

The best for me, perhaps, would be if I could lie down one evening and not wake up again.

Wittgenstein to Russell, July 1920

I had a task, did not do it, and now the failure is wrecking my life. I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky. Instead of which I remained stuck on earth, and now I am gradually fading out. My life has really become meaningless and so it consists only in futile episodes. The people around me do not notice this and would not understand; but I know that I have a fundamental deficiency. Be glad of it, if you don't understand what I am writing here.

Wittgenstein to Engelmann, 1921

But it is hard to have to be a teacher in this country where the people are so completely and utterly hopeless. In this place I do not have a soul with whom I can exchange a single reasonable word. God knows how I will be able to stand it for much longer!

Wittgenstein to Russell, 1921

We haven't met since 11 years. I don't know if you have changed during that time, but I certainly have tremendously. I am sorry to say I am no better than I was, but I am different. And therefore if we shall meet you may find that the man who has come to see you isn't really the one you meant to invite. There is no doubt that, even if we can make ourselves understood to one another, a chat or two will not be sufficient for the purpose, and that the result of our meeting will be disappointment and disgust on your side and disgust and despair on mine.

Wittgenstein to Keynes, 1924

I no longer feel any hope for the future of my life. It is as though I had before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death. I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless.

[…] I suffer greatly from the fear of the complete isolation which threatens me now., I cannot see how I can bear this life. I see it as a life in which every day I have to fear the evening that brings me only dull sadness.

My unhappiness is so complex that it is difficult to describe. But probably the main thing is still loneliness.

I have suffered much, but I am apparently incapable of learning from my life. I suffer still just as I did many years ago. I have not become any stronger or wiser.

I feel that my mental health is hanging on a thin thread.

from Wittgenstein's Diaries, April-September 1942

You won't say that I hold the present time in too much esteem; and yet if I don't despair of it, it is on account of its own desperate situation, which fills me with hope.

Marx writing to Arnold Ruge, May 1853

I said it would be dark, & he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, & he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad & he said God preserve him from sanity (God certainly will.)

Russell writing about Wittgenstein's plan to live alone in Norway for a couple of years.

Beckett once told me he found a manuscript of Quand Malone meurt. On the manuscript he found an epigraph, which is not printed in the book: “En désespoir de cause,” which means that’s the only thing I can do—write.

Elie Weisel, interviewed

If I were asked to summarise as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !

I have never met one deranged mind that lacked curiosity about God. Are we to conclude from this that there exists a link between the search for the absolute and the disaggregation of the brain?

Despondency. This English word, charged with all the nuances of collapse, will have been the key to my years, the emblem of my moments, of my negative courage, of my invalidation of all tomorrows.

In our veins flows the blood of monkeys. If we were to think of it often, we should end by giving up. No more theology, no more metaphysics – which comes down to saying no more divagations, no more arrogance, no more excess, no more anything …

So many memories that loom up without apparent necessity – of what use are they, except to show us that with age we are becoming external to our own life, that these remote 'events' no longer have anything to do with us, and that one day the same will be true of this life itself?

Hindu philosophy pursues deliverance; Greek – with the exception of Pyrrho, Epicurus, and a few unclassifiable figures – is a disappointment: it seeks only … truth.

If he doesn't have the voice of a dying man, it is because it has been so long now that he is no longer 'in life'. 'I am a snuffed candle' is the most accurate thing he said about his latest metamorphosis. When I suggested the possibility of a miracle, 'It would take more than one' was his reply.

Glum sky: my mind masquerading as the firmament.

Impossible to enter into a dialogue with physical pain.

Montesquieu: 'Happiness or misery consists in a certain arrangement of organs'.

Letters one receives filled with nothing but internal debate, metaphysical interrogations, rapidly become tiresome. In everything there must be something petty if there is to be the impression of truth. If the angels were to write, they would be – except for the fallen ones – unreadable. Purity passes with difficulty because it is incompatible with breathing.

To break with one's gods, with one's ancestors, with one's language and one's country, to break tout court, is a terrible ordeal, that is certain; but it is also an exacting one, avidly sought by the defector and, even more, by the traitor.

It is not by genius, it is by suffering, by suffering only, that one ceases to be a marionette.

To more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

Everything that inconveniences us allows us to define ourselves. Without indispositions, no identity – the luck and misfortune of a conscious organism.

Of all things one feels, nothing gives the impression of being at the very heart of truth so much as fits of unaccountable despair; compared to these, everything seems frivolous, debased, lacking in substance and interest.

To read is to let someone else work for you – the most delicate form of exploitation.

When I think of him now, I still believe he was really someone; of all the inhabitants of the village, he alone had enough imagination to ruin his life.

E. M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

… we belong to a clinical age when only cases count.

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the 'meaning' of life.

What distinguishes us from our predecessors is our offhandedness with regard to Mystery. We have even renamed it: thus was born the Absurd …

Death reaches so far, requires so much room, that I no longer know where to die.

How can a man be a philosopher? How can he have the effrontery to contend with time, with beauty, with God, and the rest? The mind swells and hops, shamelessly. Metaphysics, poetry – a flea's impertinences …

Sure of themselves, the English are boring; thus they pay for the centuries of liberty during which they could live without recourse to cunning, to the sly smile, to expedients. Easy to understand why, diametrically opposite, it is the Jews' privilege to be the most wide awake of peoples.

In other times, the philosopher who did not write but thought incurred no scorn thereby; ever since we began prostrating ourselves before the effective, the work has become the absolute of vulgarity; those who produce none are regarded as failures. But such failures would have been the sages of another age; they will redeem ours by having left no traces.

Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth …

Awareness of time: assault on time …

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

Our disgusts? – Detours of the disgust with ourselves.

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing it.

Becoming: an agony without an ending.

The older I grow, the less I enjoy performing my little Hamlet.

Don Quixote represents a civilisation's youth: he made up events; – and we don't know how to escape those besetting us.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

Adrft in the Vague, I cling to each wisp of affliction as to a drowning man's plank.

Without God, everything is nothingness; and God? Supreme nothingness.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Nature has created individuals only to relieve Suffering, to help it spread and scatter at their expense.

If History had a goal, how lamentable would be the fate of those of us who have accomplished nothing! But in the universal purposelessness, we stand proud, ineffectual streetwalkers, riffraff well-pleased with having been right.

To hope is to contradict the future.

What a pity that to reach God we must pass through faith!

Our embrassment in the presence of a ridiculous man derives from the fact that we cannot imagine him on his deathbed.

Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be … optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

The Old Testament knew how to imtimidate Heaven, how to shake a fist at whatever was on high: prayer was a quarrel between the creature and its creator. Came the Gospels to make nice: Christianity's unforgiveable error.

Even when we believe we have dislodged God from our soul, He still lingers: we realise that He finds it tedious there, but we no longer have sufficient faith to entertain Him …

On the frontiers of the self: 'What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I'.

Events – tumours of time.

Man secretes disaster.

The secret of my adaptation to life? – I've changed despairs the way I've changed shirts.

Each day is a Rubicon in which I aspire to be drowned.

The last resort to those stricken by fate is the idea of fate.

Not knowing humiliation, you are ignorant of what it is to arrive at the last stage of yourself.

The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.

from Cioran, All Gall is Divided

You don't even live once.

The 'dead letter of the law'? Life itself has frozen into a letter. What difference does the rigor mortis of legality make?

You have not yet found the right kind of solitude if you remain preoccupied with yourself.

A newspaper is canned time.

There are shallow and deep airheads.

Where do I find the time to not read so much?

He is a master of his native language – this is a military man. The artist is a servant to the word.

Views reproduce by division, thoughts by budding.

aphorisms from Karl Kraus, Dicta and Contradicta

I will go on painting until painting doesn't want me anymore, and refuses me.

Pablo Picasso

My own impression is that the things I write – thanks to my untidiness and lack of endurance – the things I write are half-baked. It's really my readers who have to construct them, or cook them at home, in their heads.

Bohumil Hrabal, in conversation

Montage had always been [Godard's] key to the cinema, a placing togather of two images, two sounds, to make a new meaning. This operation is not in fact dependent on the technology of the cinema, but it is cinema which discovered this operation – for Godard it is the discovery of cinema. Now, thanks fo the technology of video and to the generosity of […] the Swiss archive in Lausanne, Godard was able […] to undertake a montage of the twentieth century which juxtaposed the personal, the fictional, and the documentary in a way which simply ignored the usual assumptions of priority or importance of one element over another.

Colin McCabe on Histories of Cinema

You cannot and you should not look at movies in general, because there are two types of movies. One is the type which looks at the audience as children, and entertains them with fairy tales; meanwhile it only cares about the box office and how to make money of them. And there is the other type which looks at the audience as adults, beautiful, educated, intelligent and sensible. The question is which type has a more democratic and humanistic behavior. I see the audience as an adult, smart, beautiful and sensible. I make for them movies like I do because I think they deserve them.

Bela Tarr, interviewed

In State and Revolution, Lenin describes the real potential of communism as inextricable from the development of workers' skills – communism is possible because administering the state isn't rocket science; anyone can do it. Neoliberalism is doing more than rendering the state ineffective in matters of collective and social welfare. It's rendering the citizens incapable of self-governance.

Jodi Dean, I Cite

I looked at a book I have with the solar system on the cover. It was on the floor and I opened it with my bare foot. I looked at the earth nestled there among so many unfamiliar objects — a duck among the cows — and decided it was a blessing to keep trying.

Excerpt from Letters to Emma Bowlcut, Bill Callahan's novel

[Friendship] does not abolish the distance between human beings but brings that distance to life.

Walter Benjamin, commenting on a poem of Brecht, cited

The Sabbath is not simply a time for rest, for relaxation. We ought to contemplate our labours from without and not just from within.

Wittgenstein, cited

I try to do what I ought to do, and be the way one ought to be, and to adapt to the world around me – I manage to do it, but at the price of my intimate balance, I feel it…. I go through phases of being irritable, depressed. My memory doesn't exist: I forget things from one room to the next.

[scrawled on top of a newspaper article called 'Volume in the Brain']: Everything touches me – I see too much, I hear too much, everything demands too much of me.

Clarice Lispector, cited

If Bacon was more wounded by [his first, early exhibition in 1934]'s failure than he would openly admit, it was because he was sufficiently self-critical to realise that he had not yet managed to make the artistic breakthrough he wanted. His vision was too extreme to find expression easily; it required a specific language, and Bacon was still too much under the influence of Picasso to be fully conscious of his own needs. He had become closest perhaps in the third and last Crucifixion of 1933, where the massive forms and rich colouring hint at the later characteristic mood of vitality shot through with horror and despair.

[…] He had been encouraged by his immediate early success, then cast down by the failure of the show[….] In 1935, he gave up painting altogether and abandoned himself with a vengeance to drifting, from bar to bar, from person to person. His sense of life's fundamental futility was already keenly developed, and by taking it to extremes he began to turn it into a paradoxically grand style of existence. There was a furiousness in his frivolity that showed itself in the amount he would drink, the extent of his promiscuity and the recklessness of his gambling.

Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: The Anatomy of an Enigma

People pronounce the name 'Godard', which paralyzes me, alienates me, and even prevents me from reaching my true public, the public to which I have the right … I have the impression that with the New Wave, I participated in my own misfortune. Since then, people name things without wanting to know them. So when we said, for the first time in the history of the cinema, that we were 'auteurs', we found ourselves trapped. The name 'auteur' stuck to us, and we became our own name. Today, talking about me does me harm. I feel more solitary than ever. I feel like a nothing, a non-being, nonexistent. People say 'Godard' but they don't go and see my films. 

Jean-Luc Godard, speaking in 1985

'If I shoot films, it's because I'm alone. I have no family. Nobody. It's a means of seeing people. Of going places'.

Jean-Luc Godard, speaking in 1965

Q. Do your characters first come to you as voices when you start writing a play?

Exactly – as voices. I don't visualise any characters. And when Barrault wanted to stage Le Silence and Le Mensonge, he asked me how old the characters were and who they were. I was almost by accident that I wrote 'man' or 'woman'. In truth I could have switched those designations or put them in the plural. I don't see them and I don't visualise the stage either. I don't see any exterior action. I just hear voices and rhythms.

Nathalie Sarraute, interviewed

I am not interested in myself. I am interested in myself only as an instrument, just as to do certain things I have to know how to use a typewriter. In the same way I have to know how to use myself, my family, my four duaghters – none of this is unimportant. So I write with my daughters. I write with my head, with my hands, with my typewriter, but also with my daughters. I write with this dog. All this is related.

Michel Butor, interviewed

FERDINAND: I've found an idea for a novel. No longer to write about people's lives … but only about life, life itself. What goes on between people, in space … like sound and colours. That would be something worthwhile. Joyce tried, but one must be able, ought to be able, to do better.

from Godard's Pierrot Le Fou