#2,329

Not only the intellect, in some men the soul itself brays.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 377

#2,328

The great industrial trade fairs are the showcase of everything civilization does not require.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 377

#2,327

In a world of sovereign states every doctrine, no matter how universal, is eventually turned into the more or less official ideology of one of them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 377

#2,326

The typically modern solution to any problem always scandalizes one who was born with a sensibility for human excellence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 377

#2,325

Authentic French art and authentic French literature have always existed on the fringe of those “latest Parisian intellectual fashions” which the foreigner so admires.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 377

#2,324

Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, trivial to the serious man, we must start over.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 377

#2,323

The democratic ruler cannot adopt a solution as long as he does not receive the enthusiastic support of people who will never understand the problem.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 376

#2,322

Let us avoid prophecies, if we do not want to have to hold a grudge against history.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 376

#2,321

Without the spread of oriental cults and without the Germanic invasions, Hellenistic civilization would have initiated, with Rome as its starting-point, the Americanization of the world.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 376

#2,320

The American is not intolerable because he believes he is important individually, but because he possesses, insofar as he is an American, the solution to every problem.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 376

#2,319

To learn to die is to learn to let the motives for hope die without letting hope die.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 376

#2,318

The brevity of life does not distress us when instead of fixing goals for ourselves we fix routes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 376

#2,317

The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 376

#2,316

Most of our failures are due to that property of empirical series by which they have neither a certain end nor a certain beginning.
Man rarely knows where he can start and where he can finish.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 375

#2,315

The pleasures that fulfill us tend to be those so humble that we usually do not know their name.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 375

#2,314

To corrupt the individual it suffices to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 375

#2,313

The perfect serenity of the moment in which it appears as if we were bound to God by an incomprehensible complicity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 375

#2,312

We should welcome every adventure, without pagan dread or idiotic presumption.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 375

#2,311

The fact that nothing in this world fulfills us does not prevent us from longing for a world that is less ignoble and less ugly.
In a well-tended garden the soul observes with nobler tranquility the initial onslaught of winter.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 375

#2,310

If the left continues adopting, one after another, the objections that we reactionaries have raised against the modern world, we will have to become leftists.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 374

#2,309

We will soon reach the point where civilization declines with each additional comfort.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 374

#2,308

Perhaps religious practices do not improve ethical behavior, but they do without question improve manners.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 374

#2,307

In every historical situation there always arises somebody to defend in the name of liberty, humanity, or justice, the stupid opinion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 374

#2,306

The increase in freedom on the one hand, and the increase in regulation on the other, work together perfectly to demoralize society.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 374

#2,305

Technology would present fewer dangers if manipulating it were not so simple for the imbecile and so profitable for the thief.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 374

#2,304

The cultural rickets of our time is a result of the industrialization of culture.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 374

#2,303

The ages in which original ideas grow scarce devote themselves to reviving errors.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 373

#2,302

Humanity does not suppress an error without simultaneously erasing several truths.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 373

#2,301

A nation does not “demystify” its past without impoverishing its present substance.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 373

#2,300

The collision with an intelligent book makes us see a thousand stars.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 373

#2,299

When the dust raised by the great events of modern history settles, the mediocrity of the protagonists leaves the historian dumbfounded.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 373

#2,298

No past is ideal.
But only from the past do ideals arise that are not lymphatic, ideals with blood in their veins.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 373

#2,297

The economic inflation at the end of this century is a moral phenomenon.
The result, and at the same time the punishment, of egalitarian greed.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 373

#2,296

A single paragraph of sense is enough for us to have to attribute the text’s incoherence to our ineptness.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 372

#2,295

When we invent a universal meaning for the world, we deprive of meaning even those fragments that do have meaning.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 372

#2,294

In order to transform the idea of the “social contract” into an eminently democratic thesis, one needs the sophism of suffrage.
Where one supposes, in effect, that the majority is equivalent to the totality, the idea of consensus is twisted into totalitarian coercion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 372

#2,293

Ideas try to look younger with the years and only the most ancient achieve immortal youth.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 372

#2,292

It is never possible to solve a problem well, but it is always possible to solve it worse.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 372

#2,291

A man does not communicate with another man except when the one writes in his solitude and the other reads him in his own.
Conversations are either a diversion, a swindle, or a fencing match.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 372

#2,290

The left does not condemn violence until it hears it pounding on its door.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 371

#2,289

The fragment is the medium of expression of one who has learned that man lives among fragments.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 371

#2,288

Nothing is easier than to blame Russian history for the sins of Marxism.
Socialism continues to be the philosophy of shifting blame onto others.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 371

#2,287

The first generation of reactionaries accumulated warnings, the second only accumulated predictions, the following generations continue accumulating proofs.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 371

#2,286

Why “marcher avec son siècle” when one does not seek to sell it anything?

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 371

#2,285

We enemies of universal suffrage never cease to be surprised by the enthusiasm aroused by the election of a handful of incapable men by a heap of incompetent men.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 371

#2,284

To mature is to discover that every object desired is only the metaphor for the transcendent object of our desire.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 370

#2,283

“The Kingdom of God” is not the Christian name for a futuristic paradise.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 370

#2,282

Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 370

#2,281

For the man who believes in Providence the notion of providence explains nothing, since he believes that everything depends on it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 370

#2,280

The failure of progress has not consisted in the non-fulfillment but in the fulfillment of its promises.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 370

#2,279

The soul surpasses the world, whereas the world encompasses humanity.
The insignificance of humanity renders “philosophies of history” ridiculous, whereas the infinite price of each human soul vindicates religion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 370

#2,278

The goal of individuality is the realization of itself. To reduce it to the mere realization of a man’s specific character is to fundamentally frustrate it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 370

#2,277

Christianity is the religion of one who lives as if an earthquake were possible at any moment.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 369

#2,276

“Equality of opportunity” does not mean the possibility for all to be decent, but the right of all not to be decent.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 369

#2,275

The vile man is amused only by what would hurt him if it happened to him.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 369

#2,274

No principle is convincing and every conviction is uncertain. Faith is not a conviction, nor a principle, but naked existence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 369

#2,273

Man calls “absurd” what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 369

#2,272

Without canon law the Church would not have had her admirable institutional presence in history.
But the vices of Catholic theology stem from its propensity to treat theological problems with the mentality of a canon lawyer.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 369

#2,271

The devil reserves the temptations of the flesh for the most guileless; and he prefers to make the less ingenuous despair by depriving things of meaning.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 368

#2,270

Neither defeat nor misfortune diminishes the appetite for life.
Only betrayal extinguishes it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 368

#2,269

Never to think of the parts except by starting with the whole is a horrible guide for action, but the only one that saves us from living in a world without meaning.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 368

#2,268

For the man who lives in the modern world it is not the soul’s immortality in which it is difficult to believe, but in its mere existence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 368

#2,267

The democrat’s ideas are more tolerable than his manners.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 368

#2,266

Spirituality forbids itself every spiritual smile too much.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 368

#2,265

Religion is the only serious thing, but one need not take seriously every declaration of homo religiosus.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 367

#2,264

When the motive for a decision is not economic, modern man is bewildered and frightened.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 367

#2,263

The sinister structure of arguments in favor of the radical absurdity of the world wavers in the presence of the lightest thing that fulfills us.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 367

#2,262

The solution which is not ready to laugh at itself stultifies or drives one insane.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 367

#2,261

The newspaper allots the modern citizen his morning stultification, the radio his afternoon stultification, the television his evening stultification.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 367

#2,260

We should not believe in the theologian’s God except when He resembles the God called on in distress.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 367

#2,259

The only evil which we can hate without fear of harming some good is that which is rooted in pride.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 367

#2,258

The problem of educating the educators is a problem which the democrat forgets in his enthusiasm for educating the pupils.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 366

#2,257

To be able to deliver to the adolescent we were his ambitions unfulfilled, but his dreams unpolluted.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 366

#2,256

One must carefully examine the types of apologetics the unbeliever mocks the most: they might be those which disquiet him the most.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 366

#2,255

As long as he is not so imprudent as to write, many a political man passes for intelligent.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 366

#2,254

Immodesty is the solvent of sensuality.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 366

#2,253

The reactionary does not aspire to turn back, but rather to change direction.
The past that he admires is not a goal but an exemplification of his dreams.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 366

#2,252

If there existed a religious instinct, instead of religious experience, religion would lack importance.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 366

#2,251

Reason, truth, justice, tend not to be man’s goals, but the names he gives to his goals.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 365

#2,250

The worst totalitarianism is not that of a state or a nation, but of society: society as the all-encompassing goal of all goals.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 365

#2,249

It is easier to be compassionate than it is not to feel envy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 365

#2,248

Even when it is unforeseeable an event is explicable, but even when it is explicable it is unforeseeable.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 365

#2,247

The left no longer dares proclaim itself a hope, but at the most fate.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 365

#2,246

To speak of a people’s “political maturity” is characteristic of immature intelligences.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 365

#2,245

The most dangerous illiteracy is not that of a man who disrespects all books, but that of a man who respects them all.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 365

#2,244

The leftist writer never writes a history, but rather illustrates an outline with examples.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 364

#2,243

Revolutions are more a subject for sociology than for history.
Manifestations of those depths of human nature that nothing educates, nothing civilizes, nothing ennobles, revolutions despoil man of his history and return him to bestial behaviors.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 364

#2,242

Let us try to define the conditions and the causes of the spiritual history of an age, but let us be careful not to attribute to them the least participation in the truths which that age discovered.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 364

#2,241

Even small-town grudges are more civilized than the mutual indifference of big cities.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 364

#2,240

In order to be able to speak disdainfully of the great writer who has passed out of fashion, the intellectual refrains from reading him.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 364

#2,239

Civilization is the sum total of internal and external repressions imposed on the amorphous expansion of an individual or a society.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 364

#2,238

Only the unattainable deserves to be desired, only the attainable sought.
He who seeks the unattainable goes mad, he who desires the attainable is degraded.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 363

#2,237

The possibility of selling to the public any man-made object in the name of art is a democratic phenomenon.
Democratic ages, in effect, foment the uncertainty of taste by abolishing every model.
If the most excellent work of art is still possible there, lesser art dies and extravagance abounds.
Where an authority exists, on the other hand, enjoying unfamiliar works is not easy, but taste is infallible when dealing with contemporary art, and lesser art flourishes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 363

#2,236

Man’s moment of greatest lucidity is when he doubts his doubt.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 363

#2,235

. . .and lead us not into the foolishness of wondering each day at the daily wonder.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 363

#2,234

Instead of acquiring flesh, density, and substance, life loses its color, is diminished, and becomes poorer when one does not believe in another.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 363

#2,233

The cultured man and the simple man do not take an interest in anything but what spontaneously attracts them; the semi-cultured man only has artificial interests.
The semi-cultured man is the good fortune of the merchant of “culture.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 362

#2,232

The longer nature delays in avenging the offenses committed against her, the crueler her vengeance.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 362

#2,231

The leftist obviously refuses to understand that the conclusions of bourgeois thought are the principles of leftist thought.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 362

#2,230

As long as we do not know how to judge by confronting the object alone, without the interference of norms, without the consideration of consequences and causes, we have learned nothing.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 362

#2,229

Monotonous, like obscenity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 362

#2,228

Natural disasters devastate a region less effectively than the alliance of greed and technology.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 362

#2,227

Humanity longs to free itself from poverty, from toil, from war—from everything which few escape without degrading themselves.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 362

#2,226

Let the priest leave stupid occupations to the stupid, for he is not responsible for doubtful progress, but for inexorable agony.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 361

#2,225

Freedom is the term used most without knowing what it means.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 361

#2,224

We doubt the importance of many virtues as long as we do not come across the contrary vice.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 361

#2,223

Classifying is the first step toward understanding; persisting in classifying is the first step toward confusion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 361

#2,222

Even though history does not have laws, the course of a revolution is easily foreseen, because stupidity and madness do have laws.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p .361

#2,221

Revolution is a permanent historical possibility.
Revolution does not have causes, but occasions it takes advantage of.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 361

#2,220

Participants in a political movement are normally ignorant of its aim, its motive, and its origin.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 361

#2,219

Either man has rights, or the people is sovereign.
The simultaneous assertion of two mutually exclusive theses is what people have called liberalism.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 360

#2,218

What is called a solution is temporary insensibility to a problem.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 360

#2,217

Order is the most fragile of social facts.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 360

#2,216

Identifying the bourgeois class with the bourgeois mentality tricks the enemies of the bourgeoisie.
The liquidation of a bourgeois class in the modern world is, in effect, nothing more than a slaughter that does not imply the abolition of a bourgeois mentality that already dominates all of society.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 360

#2,215

Believe in God, trust in Christ, look with suspicion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 360

#2,214

Solitude is so frightening nowadays that everyone prefers the heat of battle.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 360

#2,213

To be a Christian is to not be alone, no matter the solitude that surrounds us.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 360

#2,212

To think against is more difficult than to act against.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 359

#2,211

Man bears persecution more easily than indifference.
What have the modern clergy not done to attract a little attention?

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 359

#2,210

To reconstruct the genealogy of a system, we must at last learn to quantify necessity and the anecdote.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 359

#2,209

Institutions die less from infidelity to their principle than from an excess of the principle itself.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 359

#2,208

Let us take care not to disrespect the man who possesses the stupidity necessary for the correct functioning of institutions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 359

#2,207

He who does not know how to condemn without fear does not know how to appreciate without apprehension.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 359

#2,206

Publicity does not curb a single evil. On the contrary, it multiplies the harmful consequences of events.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 359

#2,205

The heart does not rebel against the will of God, but against the “reasons” they dare attribute to it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 358

#2,204

“Life” (in emphatic quotation marks) is the consolation of those who do not know how to think.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 358

#2,203

The Christian knows that Christianity will limp until the end of the world.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 358

#2,202

Our denouncing the imbecile does not mean that we wish to get rid of him. We want diversity at any price.
But the charm of variety should not prevent us from judging correctly.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 358

#2,201

Modern theologies tend to be the contortions of a theologian who is trying to avoid admitting his unbelief to himself.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 358

#2,200

Today’s reactionary has a satisfaction which yesterday’s did not: to see modern programs end not only in disaster but also in ridicule.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 358

#2,199

The interpretation of an event given by an indoctrinated hick tends to be correct.
The interpretation given by a well-instructed and semi-learned personage is always false.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 358

#2,198

Every event assumes its form as the result of all the forces acting where the event takes place.
Everything descends indirectly from everything.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 357

#2,197

Each day it becomes easier to know what we ought to despise: what modern man admires and journalism praises.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 357

#2,196

To distinguish is the mandate of history.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 357

#2,195

For more than a century there has been no upper class.
Barely even a more pretentious segment of the middle class.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 357

#2,194

The ease with which industrial capitalism constructs and destroys—obeying clear precepts of profitability—transforms the average man into an intellectual, moral, and physical nomad.
Whatever is permanent today is an obstacle.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 357

#2,193

History relates what happened from above a certain level, but history happens below, in the common, the mediocre, the idiotic, the demented.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 357

#2,192

Concepts do not seem precise except to a man who has a merely external experience of the facts.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 356

#2,191

Whoever declares himself to be “apolitical” is an ashamed partisan of the losing side.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 356

#2,190

The naturally democratic soul feels that neither its defects, nor its vices, nor its crimes, affect its substantial excellence. The reactionary, on the other hand, feels that all corruption ferments in his soul.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 356

#2,189

Nothing surpasses the beauty of loyal love, of the love that is not loyalty with love, but the loyalty of love itself.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 356

#2,188

Such is the complexity of every historical event that we can always fear that from a good an evil might be born and always hope that from an evil a good might be born.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 356

#2,187

Whoever has understood a notion from the natural sciences has understood all that can be understood; whoever has understood a notion from the humanities has understood only what he can understand.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 356

#2,186

The historian’s didactic function lies in teaching every age that the world did not begin with it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 356

#2,185

The abundance of translations has taken away from translation its function as a selective gesture.
Translation used to be posterity’s advance; today it is the publisher’s business.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 355

#2,184

Bodies reside comfortably in the high-tech suites of a modern building, but souls have no other place to live than the ruins of an old building.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 355

#2,183

Where everyone believes he has a right to rule, everyone eventually prefers that one man alone rule.
The tyrant frees each individual from the tyranny of his neighbor.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 355

#2,182

So unforeseeable are the consequences of his actions that man finally ends up being a mere spectator of the history he makes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 355

#2,181

The bourgeoisie, in the feudal framework, settles in small urban centers where it becomes structured and civilized.
With the break-up of this framework, the bourgeoisie spreads across all of society, invents the nationalist state, rationalist technology, anonymous urban agglomerations, industrial society, the mass man, and finally the process in which society wavers between the despotism of the mob and the despotism of the expert.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 355

#2,180

Modern man’s life oscillates between two poles: business and sex.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 354

#2,179

Leftists and rightists merely argue about who is to have possession of industrial society.
The reactionary longs for its death.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 354

#2,178

The Church in recent times has not known how to distinguish between the new truths that call for the rebuilding of the theological structure and the new errors that aim at its demolition.
New Testament criticism, for example, and the “biographies” of Jesus.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 354

#2,177

History is a picture book rather than a repertoire of notions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 354

#2,176

In a democracy the only man who smiles at everyone else is the politician in search of votes.
No one else can afford the luxury of smiling at others: everyone is everyone else’s rival.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 354

#2,175

Its periods of tolerance serve humanity as time to forge a new intolerance.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 354

#2,174

Profound convictions are transmitted in silence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 353

#2,173

Today, if a man does not have a good opinion of himself, they think he is a hypocrite.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 353

#2,172

Whoever takes pride in “having lived through a lot” should keep quiet so as not to prove to us that he has understood nothing.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 353

#2,171

We reactionaries are unfortunate: the left steals our ideas and the right our vocabulary.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 353

#2,170

The devil can achieve nothing great without the careless collaboration of the virtues.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 353

#2,169

Resignation should not be an exercise in stoicism but a surrender into divine hands.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 353

#2,168

The left is a collection of those who blame society for nature’s shabby treatment of them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 353

#2,167

The lucidity of certain moments is accompanied at times by the sensation of keeping watch alone in a sleeping city.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 353

#2,166

Journalism is the dispensation from intellectual discipline.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 352

#2,165

Literary genres are born and decline as mysteriously as empires.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 352

#2,164

What is “rational” consists in prolonging life, avoiding pain, satisfying the appetite for hunger and sex.
Only some such definition sheds any light on the discourse of the last centuries.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 352

#2,163

The most convinced reactionary is the repentant revolutionary, that is to say: the man who has known the reality of the problems and has discovered the falseness of the solutions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 352

#2,162

When nothing in society deserves respect, we should fashion for ourselves in solitude new silent loyalties.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 352

#2,161

It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 352

#2,160

Whoever appeals to any science in order to justify his basic convictions inspires distrust of his honesty or his intelligence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 352

#2,159

The left calls people situated just to their right rightists.
The reactionary is not to the right of the left, but in front of it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 351

#2,158

Man ends up being motivated by the motives which they say he has. A beast if they say that his soul dies with the souls of beasts; an animal with shame, at least, if they say that he has an immortal soul.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 351

#2,157

The politician, in a democracy, becomes the jester of the sovereign people.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 351

#2,156

The stupidity of immoralism consists of seeing in the crime nothing but the murderer’s fearlessness.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 351

#2,155

Sins that appear “splendid” from afar are from close up nothing more than small sordid episodes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 351

#2,154

Today a learned man understands even a rustic spell book better than he understands his neighbor.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 351

#2,153

The disappearance of the peasantry and of the classical humanities ruptured the continuity with the past.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 351

#2,152

In politics it is only worth the trouble to listen to the criticism that has principles but not guidelines.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 350

#2,151

Nothing important is reached simply by walking.
But jumping is not enough to cross the abyss; one must have wings.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 350

#2,150

Smiles are divine, laughs human, guffaws bestial.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 350