Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam > Quotes

“There are some wounds that one can heal only by deepening them and making them worse.”
― Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam

“Brunettes are full of electricity.”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Uncertainty is a quality to be cherished, therefore – if not for it, who would dare to undertake anything?”
― Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam

“I am a man who knows nothing, guesses sometimes, finds frequently and who's always amazed.”
― Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam

“Thoughts and feelings change sometimes, as one crosses the frontiers.”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Live? Our servants will do that for us..”
― Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Axel

“My own self-consciousness cries out to me coldly: how does one love zero?”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“I have come with this message: since our gods and our aspirations are no longer anything but scientific, why shouldn't our loves be so too?”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!...What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over.”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“There are even some stars so remote that their light will reach the Earth only when Earth itself is a dead planet, as they themselves are dead, so that the living Earth will never be visited by that forlorn ray of light, without a living source, without a living destination. Often on fine nights when the park of this establishment is vacant, I amuse myself with this marvelous instrument (telescope). I go upstairs, walk across the grass, sit on a bench in the Avenue of Oaks – and there, in my solitude, I enjoy the pleasure of weighing the rays of dead stars.”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“If I could record them and transmit them to the present age, they would constitute nothing more, nowadays, than dead sounds. They would be, in a word, sounds other than what they actually were, and from what their phonographic labels pretended they were – since it's in ourselves that the silence exists. It was while the sounds were still mysterious that it would have been really interesting to render the mystery palpable and transferable.”
― Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, L'Ève Future

“Nature was quick to pass the sponge of her deluges over these awkward sketches (dinosaurs), these first nightmares of Life.”
― Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam

“The Android, as we've said, is only the first hours of Love, immobilized, the hour of the ideal made eternal prisoner”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Consider this: when you stand at the entry to a steel factory, you can make out through the smoke some men, some metal, the fires. The furnaces roar, the hammers crash; and the metalworkers who forge ingots, weapons, tools, and so on are completely ignorant of the real uses to which their products will be put. The workers can only refer to their products by conventional names. Well, that's where we all stand, all of us! Nobody can see the real character of what he creates because every knife blade may become a dagger, and the use to which an object is put changes both its name and its nature. Only our ignorance shields us from terrible responsibilities.”
― Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, L'Ève Future

“The Earth, dost thou say? What has the Earth ever realized, that drop of frozen mud, whose Time is only a lie in the Heavens?”
― Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Axel

“Within this new work of art a creature from beyond the reach of Humanity has insinuated herself and now lurks there at the heart of the mystery, a power unimagined before our time.”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“And in any case...there are no more supernatural noises nowadays...”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Imagine, if you will, this abstraction brought to life: a bourgeois Goddess.”
― Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“You're doubtless well aware that most of the great hypnotic patients wind up referring to themselves in the third person, like little children. They see themselves from outside their own organisms, outside their own sensory systems. In order to get further outside themselves, and help them escape their physical personality, some of them, once in the state of clairvoyance, have the curious custom of re-baptizing themselves. The dream name comes to them, no one knows whence, and by this they INSIST on being called as long as their luminous sleep endures – to the point of refusing to answer to any other name.”
― Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Depuis nos dieux et nos aspirations ne sont plus quelque chose mais scientifiques, pourquoi ne devraient pas nos amours être tellement aussi?”
― Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve

“Chancelant, il monta les blancs escaliers qui conduisaient à cette chambre où, le matin même, il avait couché dans un cercueil de velours et enveloppé de violettes, en des flots de batiste, sa dame de volupté, sa pâlissante épousée, Véra, son désespoir.”
― Villiers De L'Isle-Adam, Contes cruels

“ของขวัญล้ำค่าที่เรียกว่า 'ความรู้สึก' กำลังจะกลายเป็นเรื่องของเมื่อวาน ยิ่งผ่านไปเร็ว...ยิ่งดี

ฉะนั้นแล้ว ผมหวังว่าในเร็ววันนี้ทุกๆ ที่จะมีโรงละครผุดขึ้นนับร้อยนับพัน ในแต่ละวันนักแสดงจะดำเนินภาพเหตุการณ์ประจำวันซึ่งเกิดขึ้นกับทุกๆ คนเป็นปกติธรรมดา ความสมหวังหรือโศกนาฏกรรมเล็กน้อยที่สุดของมนุษย์สามัญจะถูกนำมาตีแผ่ได้ดีกว่า สมจริงกว่าความเป็นจริงหลายเท่านัก

นั่นเท่ากับว่าคุณไม่จำเป็นต้องเสียเวลา ไม่ต้องมาคอยรับมือกับความรู้สึกใดๆ ด้วยตัวเองอีก จะมีอะไรวิเศษไปกว่านี้...คุณว่าไหม? ถ้าอยากปลุกอารมณ์ชนิดใดก็เลือกชมได้ง่ายๆ เหมือนเมนูอาหาร; จะสูญเปลืองตัวเองไปกับความรู้สึกต่างๆ ทำไมกัน ในเมื่อไม่เร็วก็ช้า เดี๋ยวพวกมันก็ถูกลืม”
― Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, ทารุณนิทาน: สรรนิพนธ์

“…on the large white canvas…was refracted the life-size apparition of a very pretty and quite young red-haired woman. The vision, transparent flesh, miraculously photochrome, was dancing.…The movements had the quality of flow of Life itself, thanks to the process of serial photography which, on a six-yard- long ribbon, can capture ten minutes of the motions of a being on microscopic glass-slides, later reflected back through a powerful lamposcope.…Suddenly a flat and heavy voice, silly and harsh resounded.…The gestures, gazes, lip movements…were reproduced.”
― Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Tomorrow's Eve