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“Better an end with horror than a horror without end.”
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“So long as there is a finalistic conception of life and death, the soul, the afterlife and immortality are given, like the world, and there is no cause to believe in them. Do you believe in reality [le réel]? No, of course not: it exists but we do not believe in it. It is like God. Do you believe in God? No, of course not: God exists, but I don't believe in him. To wager that God exists and to believe in him - or that he doesn't exist and not to believe in him - is of such banality as almost to make us doubt the question, while the two propositions 'God exists, but I don't believe in him' and 'God doesn't exist, but I believe in him' both, paradoxically, suggest that, if God exists, there is no need to believe in him, but that if he does not exist, there is every need to believe in him. If something does not exist, you have to believe in it. Belief is not the reflection of existence, it is there for existence, just as language is not the reflection of meaning, it is there in place of meaning.”
― The Illusion of the End
― The Illusion of the End
“The more the panic grows, the more uplifting the image of a man who refuses to bow to the terror.”
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“It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles, with firm determination; kind and generous, compassionate, pious, virtuous, with real manhood, hardworking and sincere. Besides all these qualities, he was lenient with others, tolerant, kind, cheerful and praiseworthy and perhaps he would joke and tease his companions. He was just, truthful, smart, pure, magnanimous and present-minded; his face was radiant as if he had lights within him to illuminate the darkest of nights; he was a great man by nature who was not educated in a school nor nurtured by a teacher as he was not in need of any of this.”
― On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
― On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History
“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.”
― St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence
― St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence
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