Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

“An Immense hatred keeps me alive... i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline

“A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none.”
― Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France

“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable. . . has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others. . . And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man. . . The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”
― Joseph de Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence

“[M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short … there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.”
― Joseph de Maistre, The Executioner

“Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.”
― Joseph de Maistre

“Nothing is more vital to him than prejudices. Let us not take this word in bad part. It does not necessarily signify false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, any opinions adopted without examination. Now, these kinds of opinion are essential to man; they are the real basis of his happiness and the palladium of empires. Without them, there can be neither religion, morality, nor government. There should be a state religion just as there is a state political system; or rather, religion and political dogmas, mingled and merged together, should together form a general or national mind sufficiently strong to repress the aberrations of the individual reason which is, of its nature, the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it gives birth only to divergent opinions.”
― Joseph de Maistre

“To hear these defenders of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a committee of wise men, whereas in truth judicial murders, foolhardy undertakings, wild choices, and above all foolish and disastrous wars are eminently the prerogatives of this form of government."

Study on Sovereignty.”
― Joseph de Maistre

“There is something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t ever try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they’re bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.
I’d seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I’d better go out, I said to myself, I’d better go out again. Maybe I’ll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn’t snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you're really in despair.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans

“Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him”
― J.K. Huysmans

“Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend it reflecting on it.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans

“There are two ways of ridding ourselves of a thing which burdens us, casting it away or letting it fall. To cast away requires an effort of which we may not be capable, to let fall imposes no labour, is simpler, without peril, within reach of all. To cast away, again, implies a certain interest, a certain animation, even a certain fear; to let fall is absolute indifference, absolute contempt; believe me, use this method, and Satan will flee.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, En Route

“Speaking of dust, ‘out of which we came and to which we shall return,’ do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds of worms according as we are fat or thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy at bellies. Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“What he wanted was colours which would appear stronger and clearer in artificial light. He did not particularly care if they looked crude or insipid in daylight, for he lived most of his life at night, holding that night afforded greater intimacy and isolation and that the mind was truly roused and stimulated only by awareness of the dark; moreover he derived a peculiar pleasure from being in a well-lighted room when all the surrounding houses were wrapped in sleep and darkness, a sort of enjoyment in which vanity may have played some small part, a very special feeling of satisfaction familiar to those who sometimes work late at night and draw aside the curtains to find that all around them the world is dark, silent and dead.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. You feel just fine in this position, and only one thing gives you worry or concern: how will you ever be able to get out of your pipe?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises

“For the authentic revolutionary conservative, what really counts is to be faithful not to past forms and institutions, but rather to principles of which such forms and institutions have been particular expressions, adequate for a specific period of time and in a specific geographical area.”
― Julius Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist

“Being and stability are regarded by our contemporaries as akin to death; they cannot live unless they act, fret, or distract themselves with this or that. Their spirit (provided we can still talk about a spirit in their case) feeds only on sensations and on dynamism, thus becoming the vehicle for the incarnation of darker forces.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.”
― Julius Evola

“Worldview" is not based on books; it is an internal form, which at times in a person with little education is expressed much more brightly, than in some other "intellectual" or scientist.”
― Julius Evola

“But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.”
― Julius Evola

“To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.”
― Émile Michel Cioran

“God does not read.”
― Emil Cioran

“I’ve never practiced a profession and have lived like a sort of student. I consider this my greatest success, my life hasn’t been a failure because I succeeded in doing nothing.”
― Emil Cioran

“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.”
― Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

“If the waves were to start thinking, they would believe that they are moving forward, that they have a purpose, that they are working for the good of the sea, and they wouldn’t fail to work out a philosophy as inane as their zeal.”
― Emil Cioran, Ébauches de vertige

“All of a sudden it didn't bother me not being modern.”
― Roland Barthes

“Let's put a
chimpanzee in a tiny cage fronted by concrete bars. The animal would go berserk,
throw itself against the walls, rip out its hair, inflict cruel bites on itself, and in 73%
of cases will actually end up killing itself. Let's now make a breach in one of the
walls, which we will place next to a bottomless precipice. Our friendly sample
quadrumane will approach the edge, he'll look down, but remain at the edge for
ages, return there time and again, but generally he won't teeter over the brink; and
in all events his nervous state will be radically assuaged.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Whatever