Tears and Saints

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

Tell me how you want to die, and I’ll tell you who you are.

Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.

The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world.

There is a whole range of melancholy: it begins with a smile and a landscape and ends with the clang of a broken bell in the soul

The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It’s not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul.

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!

The Romans were not wiped out by the invasions of the barbarians, nor by the Christian virus, but by a more subtle evil, boredom.

I cannot differentiate between tears and music' (Nietzsche). Whoever is not immediately struck by the profundity of this statement has not lived for a minute in the intimacy of music. I know no other music than that of tears. Born out of the loss of paradise, music gives birth to the symbols of this loss: tears.

To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing.

Cu cât înaintezi în viaţă, îţi dai seama că nimic nu înveţi, ci regresezi în amintire. Este ca şi cum am imita o lume pe care am trăit-o cândva.

All that is Life in me urges me to give up God.

The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness.

All great conversions are born from the sudden revelation of life's meaninglessness. Nothing could be more moving or more impressive than this sudden apprehension of the void of existence.

Ce-i vom raspunde oarbei care se plange in poezia lui Rilke: «nu mai pot trai asa cu cerul pe mine»? Oare am mangaia-o de i-am spune ca nu mai putem trai cu pamantul sub noi?

Există o întreagă gamă a melancoliei: începe prin surâs şi peisaj şi sfârşeşte în dangăt de clopot spart în suflet. De aici, gustul diferit al lacrimilor.

There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such.

A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.

All nihilists have wrestled with God. One more proof of his kinship with nothingness. After you have trampled everything underfoot, his is the last bastion of nothingness left.