#1,005

The downfall of the powerful seems to us like a decree of providence, because it delights our envy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 180

#1,004

Everything that makes man feel that mystery envelops him makes him more intelligent.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 180

#1,003

Wisdom comes down to never forgetting either the nothingness that man is, or the beauty that is at times born in his hands.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 180

#1,002

The age draws near in which nature, displaced by man, will not survive except in arboretums and museums.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 180

#1,001

Of the book of the world, we know nothing but pages written in a language we do not understand.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 180

#1,000

Reason corrects logical errors, but spiritual errors can only be corrected by a person’s conversion.
The presumed proofs vanish in silence, when we contemplate them from a higher spiritual level.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 180

#999

Let us not give anyone occasion to be vile.
He will take advantage of it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 179

#998

Certain things are interesting only when lived, others only when imagined.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 179

#997

Modern man no longer dares to preach that the individual is born as a blank slate.
Too many mishaps have taught him that we are the oppressed heirs of our family, our race, our blood.
Blood is not an innocent liquid, but the viscous paste of history.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 179

#996

Modern society is proceeding simultaneously to become inhospitable to the old and to multiply their number by prolonging their lives.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 179

#995

The universe takes revenge on those who treat it as an inanimate mechanism by making them die not humiliated, but prosperous and brutish.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 179

#994

Christianity did not invent the notion of sin, but that of forgiveness.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 179

#993

When dialogue is the last resort, the situation is already hopeless.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 178

#992

Man closes his eyes before the real problems, just as the commentator does before the real difficulties of the text.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 178

#991

Modern man has imprisoned himself in his autonomy, deaf to the mysterious sound of the surge that beats against our solitude.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 178

#990

The writer who has not tortured his sentences tortures his reader.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 178

#989

I do not yearn for a virgin nature, a nature without the peasant’s ennobling footprint and without the palace crowning the hill.
But a nature safe from plebeian industrialism and irreverent manipulation.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 178

#988

As long as they do not turn equality into a dogma, we can treat each other as equals.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 178

#987

Whoever does not get a head start on his old age does not prolong his youth, but corrupts even his memories.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 178

#986

Ethics should be the aesthetics of conduct.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 177

#985

If yesterday’s bourgeois bought pictures because their subject was sentimental or picturesque, today’s bourgeois does not buy them when they have a picturesque or sentimental subject.
The subject continues to sell the picture.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 177

#984

Nations or individuals—with rare exceptions—only behave themselves decently when circumstances do not allow for anything else.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 177

#983

When the desire for other places, other centuries, awakens in us, it is not really in this or that time, in this or that country, where we desire to live, but in the very phrases of the writer who knew how to speak to us of that country or that time.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 177

#982

The preacher of the kingdom of God, when it is not Christ who preaches, ends up preaching the kingdom of man.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 177

#981

Modern history, ultimately, comes down to the defeat of the bourgeoisie and the victory of bourgeois ideas.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 177

#980

To say that freedom consists of something other than doing what we want is a lie.
That it is proper, on the other hand, to limit freedom is an obvious fact.
But deceit begins when they seek to identify freedom with the limitations they impose on it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 176

#979

Tolerance consists of a firm decision to allow them to insult everything we seek to love and respect, as long as they do not threaten our material comforts.
Modern, liberal, democratic, progressive man, as long as they do not step on his calluses, will let them degrade his soul.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 176

#978

A basic postulate of democracy: the law is the citizen’s conscience.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 176

#977

The most to which a man who knows himself can aspire is to be the least repugnant possible.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 176

#976

There are fewer ambitious individuals in the world today than individuals who believe they are morally obliged to be ambitious.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 176

#975

Every non-conformist knows, in the depths of his soul, that the place his vanity rejects is the exact same place his nature has assigned him.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 175

#974

Duties or pleasures, objects or persons: it suffices to move them from the subordinate place corresponding to each one to turn them into nothing.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 175

#973

The adolescent’s insolence is nothing more than the bucking of an ass getting used to the stable.
Whereas the insolence of the adult who brusquely casts off his shoulders the years of patience doubling him over is a marvelous spectacle.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 175

#972

The noblest things on earth may not exist except in the words that evoke them.
But it is enough that they be there for them to be.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 175

#971

Bureaucracies do not succeed revolutions by coincidence.
Revolutions are the bloody births of bureaucracies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 175

#970

The extravagance of modern art is teaching us to appreciate properly the blandness of classic art.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 175

#969

At the end of the last century there was only an “art without style”; in the second half of this century there is only a style without art.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 174

#968

A writer’s biographers tend to eliminate the person in order to occupy themselves with his insignificant life.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 174

#967

The act of despoiling an individual of his goods is called robbery, when another individual does the despoiling.
And social justice, when an entire collective entity robs him.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 174

#966

The more fundamentally he shares the prejudices of his time, the easier it is for the historian to believe he possesses objective criteria by which to judge history.
Fashion is the only absolute which nobody disputes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 174

#965

To feel capable of reading literary texts with the impartiality of a professor is to confess that literature has ceased to be pleasurable for us.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 174

#964

The belief in the fundamental solubility of problems is a characteristic peculiar to the modern world.
That all conflict between principles is simply a matter of equivocation, that there will be aspirin for every headache.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 174

#963

We eventually understand the man who knows what he is saying, no matter how complicated what it is he is saying.
But it is impossible to understand the man who merely imagines that he knows [what he is saying].

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 173

#962

The true religion is monastic, ascetic, authoritarian, hierarchical.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 173

#961

God is the truth of all illusions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 173

#960

The caprices of his passions perhaps save man from the catastrophe toward which he is launched by the automatisms of his intelligence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 173

#959

We should resign ourselves to the fact that nothing lasts, but refuse to hasten anything’s demise.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 173

#958

We should politely welcome into our souls all of the world’s beauty.
Without delivering our eternal heart up to that transient guest.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 173

#957

We can neither place conditions on life nor receive everything it gives.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 173

#956

To discover the countenance of Christ in the face of modern man requires more than an act of faith—an act of credulity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 172

#955

Once youth is past, chastity forms a part not so much of ethics as of good taste.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 172

#954

“Solutions” are the ideologies of stupidity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 172

#953

After the passage of a few years, we only hear the voice of the person who spoke without any shrillness.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 172

#952

For the myth of a past golden age, present day humanity today has substituted the myth of a future plastic age.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 172

#951

To be authentically modern is, in any century, a sign of mediocrity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 172

#950

Doctrines that seek to sway crowds must hide, shamefully, the inevitable arbitrariness of their postulates and the inevitable uncertainty of their conclusions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 172

#949

Those who prophesy more than indefinite cycles of decline and ascent are hiding some suspicious product they want to sell for cash.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 171

#948

The modern theologian longs to transform Christian doctrine into a simple ideology of community behavior.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 171

#947

The reactionary does not respect everything history brings, but respects only what it brings.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 171

#946

So great is the distance between God and human intelligence that only an infantile theology is not puerile.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 171

#945

The most customary form of suicide in our time consists of firing a bullet into the soul.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 171

#944

Religious individualism forgets the neighbor; communitarianism forgets God.
The more serious error is always the latter.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 171

#943

Revelation is the value that suddenly supervenes on a psychological event.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 170

#942

Capitalism is abominable because it achieves that disgusting prosperity promised in vain by the socialism that hates it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 170

#941

Contemporary thinkers differ among each other in the same way as do international hotels, whose uniform structure is superficially adorned with indigenous motifs.
When, in truth, the only interesting thing is mental localism which expresses itself in a cosmopolitan vocabulary.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 170

#940

Time modifies the topography of our convictions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 170

#939

Confusion is the normal result of a dialogue.
Except when a single author invents it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 170

#938

When reason takes flight to escape history, it is not in the absolute where it alights, but in the fashion of the day.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 170

#937

A gesture, just one gesture, is enough at times to justify the existence of the world.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 170

#936

The history of Christianity reveals to the Christian what kind of presence Christ wanted to have in history.
To seek to erase that history, to return to the lone Christ of the gospels, is not a gesture of devotion but of pride.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 169

#935

It is easier to forgive the progressive for progress than for his faith.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 169

#934

The progressive clergy never disappoint an aficionado of the ridiculous.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 169

#933

The souls of youths would not be so boring if they did not exhibit them so freely.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 169

#932

Nothing happens more frequently than that we feel we possess several ideas, because we only seize upon inadequate expressions of the same one.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 169

#931

Let us try, as we grow older, to assume attitudes which our adolescence would have approved and to have ideas which it would not have understood.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 169

#930

Foolish ideas are immortal.
Each new generation invents them anew.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 169

#929

Just as the democrat’s electoral skill seems to be a proof of his intelligence, the follies of his public declarations seem to be deliberate.
Until we discover, to our astonishment, that he believes in them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 168

#928

The intention to engage in dialogue, today, presupposes the intention to betray.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 168

#927

Modern civilization automatically recruits anyone who moves.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 168

#926

The writer cannot pride himself on the successes he attains, but on the mistakes he avoids.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 168

#925

I am not a non-conformist modern intellectual but an indignant medieval peasant.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 168

#924

The historian should show us that the past was, at the same time, trivial like every present, and fascinating like every past.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 168

#923

The most ominous of modern perversions is the shame of appearing naïve if we do not flirt with evil.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 168

#922

Physiology on one side, sociology on another, signed the partition of psychology.
Personal life has been abolished, like the Polish Sejm.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 167

#921

Man's three enemies are: the devil, the state, and technology.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 167

#920

The decay of modern civilization is only doubted in an under-developed country.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 167

#919

Today’s revolutionaries are just impatient heirs.
Revolution will be spoken of seriously when the “consumption” they hate is not just someone else’s consumption.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 167

#918

Those sins that scandalize the public are less grave than those it tolerates.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 167

#917

The most repulsive and grotesque spectacle is that of the superiority of a living professor over a dead genius.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 166

#916

Generalizing extends our power and impoverishes our spirit.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 166

#915

If only the philosophes of the 18th century would rise from the dead with their wit, their sarcasm, their audacity, so that they would undermine, dismantle, demolish the “prejudices” of this century.
The prejudices they bequeathed to us.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 166

#914

Though he knows he cannot win, the reactionary has no desire to lie.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 166

#913

Terror is the natural regime for every society without traces of feudalism.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 166

#912

The old despotisms limited themselves to locking man up in his private life; those of the new stamp prefer that he have nothing but a public life.
To domesticate man all one has to do is politicize all his gestures.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 166

#911

A great historian is not so much one who notices defects in what he admires as one who acknowledges virtues in what he detests.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 165

#910

Even if inequality could be wiped out, we should prefer it to equality out of love for polychromy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 165

#909

Knowing which reforms the world needs is the only unequivocal symptom of stupidity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 165

#908

The punishment of the man who searches for himself is that he finds himself.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 165

#907

Faith in God does not solve problems, but makes them laughable.
The serenity of the believer is not a presumption of knowledge, but a fullness of confidence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 165

#906

So great is the Marxist’s faith in Marx that he usually refrains from reading him.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 165

#905

Democracy does not entrust power to anyone who does not pay it the homage of sacrificing to it his conscience and taste.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 164

#904

Perhaps individually men are our neighbors, but massed together they are surely not.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 164

#903

Reading the newspaper degrades whomever it does not make into a brute.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 164

#902

As those things which age does not ennoble are as rare as men whom age does ennoble, the modern world destroys old things and prolongs man’s senility.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 164

#901

An historical period is the period of time during which a certain definition of the legitimate prevails.
Revolution is the transition from one definition to another.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 164

#900

The first revolution broke out when it occurred to some fool that law could be invented.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 164

#899

Revolution—every revolution, revolution per se—is the matrix of bourgeoisies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 163

#898

Atop the bell tower of the modern church the progressive clergy, instead of a cross, place a weathervane.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 163

#897

Catholics do not suspect that the world feels swindled by every concession that Catholicism makes to it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 163

#896

The unbeliever does not forgive the apostate who confirms him in his unbelief.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 163

#895

The historian deals with history like an artist painting a portrait.
The sociologist like a policeman adding to his file.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 163

#894

The Marxist has no doubt about the perversity of his adversary.
The reactionary merely suspects that his adversary is stupid.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 163

#893

The worst demagogues are not recruited from among the poor and envious, but from among the wealthy and ashamed.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 163

#892

The gate of reality is horizontal.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 162

#891

If the Europeans renounce their particularities in order to generate the “good European,” we fear they will only beget another American.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 162

#890

Progress in the end comes down to stealing from man what ennobles him, in order to sell to him at a cheap price what degrades him.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 162

#889

The world appears less alien to someone who acts than one’s own soul appears to someone who observes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 162

#888

We can never count on a man who does not look upon himself with the look of an entomologist.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 162

#887

Just as much as by the fact which humbles our pride, I am delighted by the noble gesture which dispels the fear of our radical baseness.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 162

#886

History would be reduced to an inventory of types if each one of its typical instances did not inhere in a person.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 162

#885

Those who remove man’s chains free only an animal.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 161

#884

Journalists and politicians do not know how to distinguish between the development of an idea and the lengthening of a sentence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 161

#883

The colony which gains its independence passes from acknowledged imitation to artificial originality.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 161

#882

The modern world demands that we approve what it should not even dare ask us to tolerate.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 161

#881

We only succeed in saying what we want when we accidentally say what we should.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 161

#880

The Muse does not visit the man who works more, or the man who works less, but whomever she feels like.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 161

#879

Those who seek to abolish man’s alienation by changing the juridical structure of the economy remind one of the man who solved the problem of his marital misfortune by selling the sofa on which the adultery took place.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 161

#878

Philosophy is the art of lucidly formulating problems.
Inventing solutions is not an occupation of serious intellects.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 160

#877

The new liturgists have gotten rid of the sacred pulpits so that no villain will assert that the Church aspires to compete with the secular professors’ bully pulpits.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 160

#876

The reactionary does not become a conservative except in ages which maintain something worthy of being conserved.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 160

#875

This foolish century allows the vulgarity of eroticism to deprive it of the delights of immodesty.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 160

#874

Many doctrines are less valuable for the truths they contain than for the errors they reject.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 160

#873

The Church was able to baptize medieval society because it was a society of sinners, but her future is not promising in modern society, where everyone believes he is innocent.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 160

#872

Our misery proceeds less from our problems than from the solutions which are appropriate for them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 159

#871

Compared to so many dull intellectuals, to so many artists without talent, to so many stereotyped revolutionaries, a bourgeois without pretensions looks like a Greek statue.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 159

#870

Poetry is God’s fingerprint in human clay.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 159

#869

Let us not accuse modern man of having killed God. That crime is not within his reach.
But of having killed the gods.
God survives untouched, but the universe withers and decays because the subordinate gods have passed away.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 159

#868

Social conflicts, in a healthy society, are rooted between functional sectors; in a sick society between economic strata.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 159

#867

The modern world bitterly censures those who “turn their back on life.”
As if it were possible to know with certainty that turning one’s back on life is not turning one’s face toward the light.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 158

#866

A culture dies when nobody knows in what it consists, or when everybody thinks he knows.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 158

#865

Many people believe that a laconic statement is dogmatic and judge the generosity of an intelligence by the prolixity of its prose.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 158

#864

Lucidity, in the 20th century, has as its requisite abandonment to hope.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 158

#863

It is not easy to discern whether contemporary journalism is a cynical way to get rich by corrupting man or a “cultural” apostolate carried out by hopelessly uncivilized minds.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 158

#862

Since to explain is to identify, knowledge is not explanatory where individuality is its object.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 158

#861

What the contemporary psychologist emphatically rejects is less the notion of instinct than the word “instinct.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 158

#860

Modern society harbors the peculiar intention of systematically substituting political authorities for social authorities.
That is to say: administrative duties for civilizing requests.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 157

#859

Every straight line leads directly to a hell.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 157

#858

Indignant with the bourgeois who “eases his conscience” by giving alms from his own private wealth, the leftist Catholic proposes to do it through self-sacrifice by distributing the private wealth of others.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 157

#857

For more than a millennium, the period of European history lasted during which social salvation was possible.
And was achieved several times.
But in democratic, or imperial, times we can only save souls.
And not always that.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 157

#856

Dialogue perverts its participants.
Either they are obstinate out of a desire to fight, or they give in out of laziness.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 157

#855

Man is made vain by his works, because he forgets that, though what he makes belongs to him, it does not belong to him to have the capacity to make it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 156

#854

The expert believes he is a superior being, because he knows what, by definition, anybody can learn.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 156

#853

God is the term with which we notify the universe that it is not everything.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 156

#852

When we hear the final chords of a national anthem, we know with certainty that someone has just said something stupid.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 156

#851

The ineptitude and folly of the bishops’ and popes’ chatter would disturb us, if we old Christians had not fortunately learned as little children to sleep during the sermon.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 156

#850

Intelligence consists not in handling intelligent ideas, but in handling any idea intelligently.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 156

#849

With the whole world becoming more bourgeois, I miss the dead aristocracy less than I miss the vanished people.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 156

#848

Modern man does not expel God so that he can assume responsibility for the world.
But rather so that he does not to have to assume responsibility.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 155

#847

It would be easier to resolve modern problems, if, for example, it were possible to sustain the Utopian fantasy that what causes the multiplication of plastic objects is only the manufacturer’s commercial greed, and not the idiotic admiration of the presumed buyers.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 155

#846

The adversary of modern principles has no allies more loyal than the consequences of those principles.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 155

Happy Easter!

An empty tomb.

Notas, p. 477

#845

With the object of preventing dangerous concentrations of economic power in the hands of a few anonymous associations, socialism proposes that the totality of economic power be entrusted in a lone anonymous association called the state.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 155

#844

An economy is called socialist if it needs to make great efforts to set up the spontaneous mechanisms of capitalism.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 155

#843

The religious life begins when we discover that God is not a postulate of ethics, but the only adventure in which it is worth the trouble to risk ourselves.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 155

#842

There is no individual who, upon evaluating himself without previous preparation, does not find that he is inferior to many, superior to few, equal to none.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 154

#841

With somebody who is ignorant of certain books no discussion is possible.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 154

#840

The increasing disintegration of the person can be measured by comparing the expression “amorous adventure,” which was in style in the 18th century, with the expression “sexual experience,” which is used in the 20th century.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 154

#839

The historian does not establish himself in the past with the intention of better understanding the present.
What we were is not pertinent to his inquiry into what we are.
What we are is not pertinent to his investigation of what we were.
The past is not the historian’s apparent goal, but his real goal.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 154

#838

Whoever looks without admiration or hatred has not seen.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 154

#837

The best organized political enterprises, just like the wisest economic measures, are only games of chance where one wins by a stroke of luck.
The statist, made conceited by his success, asserts that he knowingly bought the winning lottery ticket.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 154

#836

Families are often purulent cells of stupidity and unhappiness, because an ironic necessity demands that the governance of such elemental structures require as much intelligence, astuteness, and diplomacy as does the governance of a state.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 153

#835

To be civilized is to be able to criticize what we believe in without ceasing to believe in it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 153

#834

What is personal in the artist is not the person, but his vision of the world.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 153

#833

Colonialism’s true crime was to turn the great Asiatic peoples into the outskirts of the West.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 153

#832

The fervor of the homage which the democrat renders to humanity is comparable only to the coldness with which he disrespects the individual.
The reactionary disdains man, without meeting an individual he scorns.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 153

#831

Those whose gratitude for receiving a benefit is transformed into devotion to the person who grants it, instead of degenerating into the usual hatred aroused by all benefactors, are aristocrats.
Even if they walk around in rags.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 152

#830

Latin American revolutions have never sought anything more than to hand power over to some Directoire.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 152

#829

By embracing the “modern mentality,” Christianity became a doctrine which it is not easy to respect, nor interesting to do so.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 152

#828

We spend a life trying to understand what a stranger understands at a glance: that we are just as insignificant as the rest.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 152

#827

As the waters of this century rise, delicate and noble sentiments, sensuous and fine tastes, discreet and profound ideas take refuge in a few solitary souls, like the survivors of the flood on some silent mountain peaks.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 151

#826

It fell to this century to have the privilege of inventing the pedantry of obscenity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 151