Цитаты из книги «Книга непокоя», страница 14

Каждый из нас - это двое, и когда два человека встречаются, приближаются друг к другу, объединяются, редко случается, чтобы эти четверо могли бы прийти к согласию. Человек мечтающий в каждом человеке действия, если он столько раз ссорится с человеком действия, как же он не будет ссориться в человеком действия и с человеком мечтающим — в Другом.

В соответствии со своими мыслями и наблюдениями, я замечаю, что ни в чём, по-настоящему важном в жизни или полезном для неё, люди не знают истины и не пришли к согласию.

Можно сказать, что мы не знаем, что есть зло, поэтому не можем и утверждать, является ли что-то плохим или хорошим. В действительности, однако, любая боль, хотя бы и для нашего блага, есть сама по себе зло, и этого довольно, чтобы она оказалась злом в мире. Достаточно и одной зубной боли, чтобы разувериться в доброжелательности Создателя.

The whole of the human tragedy is summed up in this tiny example of how the people we think about are never the people we think they are.

Death is what we are and what we live. We are born dead, we deadly exist, and we are already dead when we enter Death.Whatever lives, lives because it changes; it changes because it passes; and, because it passes, it dies. Whatever lives is constantly transforming into something else – it continually denies itself, it perpetually evades life.Life is thus an interval, a link, a relation, but a relation between what has passed and what will pass, a dead interval between Death and Death.

Might not God be an enormous child? Doesn’t the whole universe seem like a game, like the prank of a mischievous child? So unreal, so.....I laughingly threw out this idea for consideration, and only now, seeing it from a distance, do I realize how ghastly it is. (Who’s to say it isn’t true?) And it falls to the ground at my feet, shattering into shards of mystery and pulverized horror…I wake up to make sure I exist…

Children know that the doll isn’t real, but they treat it as if it were, to the point of crying with grief when it breaks. The art of children is in non-realization. How blessed is that deluded age, when life is negated by the absence of sex, and reality is negated by the act of playing, unreal things standing in for real ones!O divinely absurd intuition of children! True vision of things, which we always dress with conventions, however nakedly we see them, and always blur with our ideas, however directly we look at them!

The beautiful crimes aren’t the ones we know. Borgia committed beautiful crimes? Believe me that he didn’t. The one who committed beautiful, lavish, fruitful crimes was our dream of Borgia, the idea we have of Borgia. I’m certain that the Cesare Borgia who existed was banal and stupid. He must have been, because to exist is always stupid and banal.

Every sound mind believes in God. No sound mind believes in a definite God. There is some being, both real and impossible, who reigns over all things and whose person (if he has one) cannot be defined, and whose purposes (if he has any) cannot be fathomed. By calling this being God we say everything, since the word God – having no precise meaning – affirms him without saying anything. The attributes of infinite, eternal, omnipotent, all-just or all-loving that we sometimes attach to him fall off by themselves, like all unnecessary adjectives when the noun suffices. And He who, being indefinite, cannot have attributes, is for that very reason the absolute noun.

The same certainty and the same obscurity exist with respect to the soul’s survival. We all know that we die; we all feel that we won’t die. It’s not just a desire or hope that brings us this shadowy intuition that death is a misunderstanding; it’s a visceral logic that rejects .....

What’s the point of knowing that in the sun or in the rain, as a body or a soul, I will also pass on? No point – just the hope that everything is nothing and nothing, therefore, everything.