#1,636

In order to cure the patient it injured in the 19th century, industrial society had to numb his mind in the 20th century.
Spiritual misery is the price of industrial prosperity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 274

#1,635

Between the desert pole and the city pole extends the equatorial zone of civilization.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 274

#1,634

What the beauty of a poem signifies has no connection at all with what the poem signifies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 274

#1,633

Fashion adopts those philosophies which cautiously avoid problems.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 273

#1,632

What is obvious to one age seems like an enigma to another age, and what is an enigma to one seems obvious to another.
In never-ending cycles.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 273

#1,631

How long an idea remains in effect does not depend on its validity; it depends on incidental circumstances.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 273

#1,630

Even the most discreet truth appears to modern man to be insufferable insolence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 273

#1,629

Nothing obliges the man who only meditates to debate every fool who argues.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 273

#1,628

I walk in the dark.
But I am guided by the smell of broom.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 273

Announcement

All the aphorisms that have been translated up to this point have come from the first two volumes of Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1977).

Translations of selected aphorisms from Nuevos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1986) will begin appearing tomorrow.

#1,627

I do not belong to a world that is passing away.
I prolong and transmit a truth that does not die.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 269

#1,626

To write for posterity is not to worry whether they will read us tomorrow.
It is to aspire to a certain quality of writing.
Even when no one reads us.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 269

#1,625

The writer invites us to understand his language, not to translate it into the language of our equivalencies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 269

#1,624

To understand a philosopher it is not necessary to make an inventory of his ideas, but to identify the angel against which he fights.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 269

#1,623

The reactionary is the guardian of every heritage.
Even the heritage of the revolutionary.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 269

#1,622

The reactionary is not upset by certain things, but by anything out of place.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 269

#1,621

Revolutions have as their function the destruction of the illusions that cause them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 269

#1,620

I am like the people: luxury does not upset me except in unworthy hands.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 268

#1,619

Journalism was the cradle of literary criticism.
The university is its tomb.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 268

#1,618

Even when it is right, a revolution solves nothing.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 268

#1,617

The eagerness with which an explanation for everything is sought in the psychology of the unconscious is a reflection of modern anxiety in the presence of transcendence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 268

#1,616

The leftist who protests equally against the crimes of the right or the left is called by his comrades, and rightly so, a reactionary.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 268

#1,615

The only thing that makes modern man ashamed is to confess admiration for an author who is out of style.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 268

#1,614

Absolute revolution is the favorite topic of those who do not even dare to protest when they are trodden on.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 268

#1,613

Everything is voluminous in this century.
Nothing is monumental.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 267

#1,612

What the democrat calls “Man” is no more than the ghostly projection of his pride.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 267

#1,611

No one should dare, without trembling, to influence anyone’s destiny.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 267

#1,610

The “apostles of culture” eventually turn it into a business.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 267

#1,609

The reactionary does not condemn the bourgeois mentality, but rather its predominance.
What we reactionaries deplore is the absorption of the aristocracy and the people by the bourgeoisie.
It is the emasculation of liberty or, alternatively, of equality.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 267

#1,608

The true historian’s greatest delight is the spectacle of a thesis colliding with a fact and shattering into a thousand pieces.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 267

#1,607

“Social justice” is the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 267

#1,606

Enthusiasm, in leftist regimes, is a synthetic product manufactured by the police.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 266

#1,605

To insult an inferior is just slightly more vile than to flatter him.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 266

#1,604

What was true yesterday is not always error today, as fools believe.
But what is true today can be error tomorrow, as fools forget.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 266

#1,603

Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 266

#1,602

Life demands that we reach conclusions, but not that we trust them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 266

#1,601

The “solutions” that puff contemporaries up with pride seem within a few years inconceivably stupid.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 266

#1,600

An authentic reader is someone who reads for pleasure the books which everyone else only studies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 266

#1,599

The “cultural” expressions of these “new countries” are not originally born one from another, like branches from the same trunk.
On the contrary, being imported, they superimpose themselves mechanically one onto another, like aeolian alluvia.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,598

Where he is easy to refute, as in the natural sciences, the imbecile can be useful without being dangerous.
Where he is difficult to refute, as in the humanities, the imbecile is dangerous without being useful.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,597

I trust less in the arguments of reason than in the antipathies of intelligence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,596

A confused idea attracts a fool like a flame attracts an insect.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,595

When an author is put on a school’s syllabus, his name lives and his work dies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,594

The effect of democratic rhetoric on taste is called nausea.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,593

The “decisions of the human conscience” are the clandestine echo of fashion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 265

#1,592

Systematic reductions to single terms (pleasure and pain, self-interest, economics, sex, etc.) fabricate likenesses of intelligibility that seduce the ignorant.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,591

Order paralyzes. Disorder convulses.
Inscribing a disorder instituted within an all-inclusive order was the miracle of feudalism.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,590

Marx has been the only Marxist whom Marxism has not stultified.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,589

The internationalization of the arts does not multiply their sources, but rather the causes of their corruption.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264

#1,588

No one praises the people except the man who means to sell it something or rob it of something.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 264