Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don’t let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.

Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.

When someone seeks to confirm his elect status by a direct, personal contact with someone famous, he runs the risk of being thrown out, like the woman who loved Kissinger.

I remember that the day I finished ‘The Angels,’ part three of ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’, I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

The best actors do not let the wheels show.

There are no small parts. Only small actors.

We are all dancers, as you say. I would even say: either we’re dancers or we’re deserters.

This character so unbelievably, implausibly good and yet so real, he is surely more worthy of compassion than the ‘diligent benefactress’ in the provinces who so touched Sainte-Beuve.

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain.

The eye… the point where a person’s identity is concentrated.

I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.

Beauty is a rebellion against time.

No love can survive muteness.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

I find myself fascinating

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.

Pain doesn’t listen to reason, it has its own reason, which is not reasonable.

Doesn’t the art of the novel, with its feel for the relativity of human truths, require that the author’s opinion stay out of sight and that all thinking be left to the reader alone?

Man’s world is the planet of inexperience.

Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.

Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.

Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.

Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

Chance and chance alone has a message for us… Only chance can speak to us.

To laugh is to live profoundly.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same.

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring–it was peace.

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.

I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way.

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?

I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind… I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you.

The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present… he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future… he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.

All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it.

The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.

Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

A man is responsible for his ignorance.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.

The only way to deal with this life is to find a way to laugh at it.

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

The future is a realm of possibilities, which we inhabit before it becomes the past.

Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory.

The feeling of nostalgia is a feeling of home.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful.

People quickly grow accustomed to the incredible if they are exposed to it on a daily basis.

An era that has lost its gods cannot just choose one at random and worship it. So it must be indifferent to all gods, including the Christian God.

No, my friend, forget the lottery! Win or lose, it is the same, it is a kind of deadly game in which we can never guess the consequences.

Destruction is the work of an afternoon. Creation is the work of a lifetime.

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.

The future is a gray enemy who takes away all mystery and replaces it with boredom, the future is our ultimate disappointment.

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case.

We can never know what to want, because living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals.