Albert Caraco Quotes

Our most terrifying fears and our innermost secret desires for extermination are reflected in this elegant and profound book, without any sort of leniency to attenuate the disgust and hopelessness we feel when faced with a humanity constantly atrophied by a series of values and practices that lead to chaos.

We strive towards death like an arrow towards its target, and we never miss. Death is our only certainty, and we always know that we will die, no matter where, when, or how. The idea of eternal life is nonsense, eternity is not life, death is the rest we seek, life and death are intertwined, and those who demand something else ask for the impossible and will earn nothing but smoke.

L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne (1975) p. 53

If I had to live my life over again, I wouldn't change a thing. I fully approve of what I've done, and I'm immensely proud of myself. It's life itself that I despise, not my existence; it's the principle, not its application, that couldn't have been better, given the circumstances.

L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne (1975), p. 52

The educated reader knows, as he reads me, that he is listening to a fugue in four voices.

Our moral ideas are not transcendent, our moral ideas are historical and History obeys to changing Aions, we feel that ours is fading and no authority can enforce confidence rooted in what no power includes : in Sensibility itself. To every Aion a new Sensibility adheres and to each Sensibility another Aion is related, sin is nowhere, we only see abuse and worst among abuses, the delusion of sin as such.

I was born to myself between 1946 and 1948, I then opened my eyes on the world, until that moment I have been blind.

French, German, English and Spanish are four admirable languages and I manage to express myself in all of them with more or less skill.

L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne (1975), p. 92

We are too many to live, but never enough to suffer and die.

Pessimism has never been in fashion because no order could stand it; it's a luxury of the mind, and thus beyond the reach of the common man.

Le galant homme, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne (1967), p. 221

In every saint there lurks an arrant knave, the marrow of all holiness being absolute hellishness. That's why our Saviors are of no avail, their remedies being too strong for the common man, who is the puppet of his fleshly appetite and not a sinner.

L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne (1975), p. 91