Oscar Levy Quotes

Some one wrote to me upon the publication of my book two years ago: “But you live in England! Poor man: then you are a preacher in the desert!” So I am. But I owe something to my desert. The desert is an excellent place for anybody who can make use of it, as biblical and post-biblical experience proves. Without my desert I should not have written my book. Without coming to England I should have become a modern creature, going in for money and motor-cars. For I was born with a fatal inclination for such lighter and brighter kind of things. I was born under a lucky star, so to say: I was born with a warm heart and a happy disposition; I was born to play a good figure in one of those delightful fêtes champêtres of Watteau, Lancret, and Boucher, with a nice little shepherdess on my arm, listening to the sweet music of Rossini and drinking the inspiring “Capri bianco” or “Verona soave” of that beautiful country Italy. But the sky over here is not blue—nor grows there any wine in England—and no Rossini ever lived here; and towards the native shepherdesses I adopted the ways of the Christian towards his beautiful ideals: I admired them intensely but kept myself afar. So there was nothing to console your thirsty and disenchanted traveller in the British Sahara. In the depths of his despair, there was sent to him, as to the traveller in the desert, an enchanting vision, a beautiful fata Morgana rising on the horizon of the future, a fertile and promising Canaan of a new creed that had arisen in Germany (there too as a revulsion against the desert): the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
So I owe something to the desert. Had I not wandered there so long, I could never have fervently wished to escape nor finally succeeded in coming out of it.

If I have blamed here Christianity, Christian morals, Christian humanity and helpfulness; if I have spoken ironically of all the lighter, minor, and female virtues this teaching has produced and still produces—I have done so in the name of those who have lifted themselves above them, who have outgrown them, who have acquired greater than Christian virtues.

In spite of my attack on Christianity: the Englishman who is a Christian is very much nearer to my heart than he who is not.

I shall hate my brethren in St. Revoluzio, because they spoil all my pleasure in being disobedient and revolutionary myself; I shall love my enemies much better than those enthusiastic persons: but I shall console myself with the example of some one else, who also loved his enemies and, nevertheless, had, in propagating a new teaching, to suffer from the society of sinners, hysterical women, maniacs, and all the poor in spirit.

You English are never as thorough, never as decided, never as dead-set in your views as your cousins over the Channel. You are a people of compromises, of opportunism, of amiable and business-like settlements; you can even strike a bargain with your own conscience and live ever happy afterwards. … This is no doubt a great virtue, because it has preserved you from great follies, and it is no doubt a great vice, because it has sadly refrigerated your enthusiasm and your “feu sacré.”

While in the nineteenth century you [Englishmen] have been occupied in consolidating an empire, conquering new countries, and spreading civilization to all parts of the world, you have in true British magnanimity forgotten to confer this blessing upon yourselves.

You have noticed with alarm that the Jewish elements provide the driving forces for both communism and capitalism, for the material as well as the spiritual ruin of this world. But then you have at the same time the profound suspicion that the reason of all this extraordinary behaviour may be the intense Idealism of the Jew. In this you are perfectly right. The Jew, if caught by an idea, never thinks any more in watertight compartments, as do the Teuton and Anglo-Saxon peoples, whose right cerebral hemisphere never seems to know what its left twin brother is doing: he, the Jew, like the Russian, at once begins to practise what he preaches, he draws the logical conclusion from his tenets, he invariably acts upon his accepted principles. It is from this quality, no doubt, that springs his mysterious force — that force, which you no doubt condemn, but which you had to admire even in the Bolshevists.

Surely it is not every one who is chosen to combat a religion or a morality of two thousand years’ standing, fist within and then without himself.