Died on June 20 — Quotes

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Basically—I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs—life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Existing is plagiarism.

it is widely known — and discussed (although not in print) — that not among the least of those who have persecuted the poor law-breakers in this respect have rich law-breaking friends and do themselves break the law and benefit by the scientific knowledge they are instrumental in sending others to prison for disseminating.

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.

[F]or the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat.

Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

To fear is to die every minute.

June with her glancing grasses, June with a smiling sky,
June, brown as the country lasses Or wings of the dragon-fly!The mown hay lies like sedges Or weed of the seashore strewn;
Abrim with corn to the hedges The fields are filled in June.

I think the difficulty lies in the immeasurable vanity of the human adult, particularly the pedagogical adult,… which does not permit him to recognize as good any tendency in children to fly in the face of his conceptions of a correct human being; to recognize that may be here is something highly desirable, to be encourage, rather than destroyed as pernicious…. [Y]our teacher has usually well-defined conceptions of what men and women have to be. And if a boy is too lively, too noisy, too restless, too curious, to suit the concept, he must be trimmed and subdued.

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.