Not all defeated men are decent, but all decent men end up being defeated.
Modern man’s misfortune lies not in having to live a mediocre life, but in believing that he could live a life that is not mediocre.
Modern man imagines that it is sufficient to open the windows in order to cure the soul’s infection, that it is not necessary to clear out the trash.
Let us lament less the obscenity of today’s novelist than his misfortune.
When man becomes insignificant, copulation and defecation become important
actions.
Love may have its erotic spring, but its autumn must remain chaste.
– Few notions are more embarrassing than a fifty-year old man copulating
with a forty-year old woman.
Whoever abandons himself to his instincts degrades his face as obviously as he degrades his soul.
Degradation is the current price of brotherhood.
Progress in the end comes down to stealing from man what ennobles him, in order to sell to him at a cheap price what degrades him.
Tolerance consists of a firm decision to allow them to insult everything
we seek to love and respect, as long as they do not threaten our material
comforts.
Modern, liberal, democratic, progressive man, as long as they do not step on
his calluses, will let them degrade his soul.
Humanity longs to free itself from poverty, from toil, from war—from everything which few escape without degrading themselves.
Wisdom, in this century, consists above all in knowing how to put up with vulgarity without becoming upset.
The victims of the most serious individual and social catastrophes are often not even aware: individuals become brutish, societies become degraded, unawares.
Liberalism proclaims the right of the individual to degrade oneself, provided one’s degradation does not impede the degradation of one’s neighbor.
The threat of collective death is the only argument which shakes
humanity’s complacency today.
Atomic death troubles it even more than its increasing degradation.
Only the unattainable deserves to be desired, only the attainable
sought.
He who seeks the unattainable goes mad, he who desires the attainable
is degraded.
Let us be careful not to call accepting what degrades us without any resistance “accepting life.”
Prayer, war, tillage are manly occupations.
It is impossible to travel around and to be intelligent at the same
time.
Intelligence is a matter of being able to sit still.
Sexual promiscuity is the tip society pays in order to appease its slaves.
An abrupt demographic expansion rejuvenates society and makes its stupidities recrudesce.
The key event of this century is the demographic explosion of idiotic ideas.
To liberate man is to subject him to greed and sex.
Sex does not solve even sexual problems.
When the modern consciousness suspends its economic routines, it only oscillates between political anguish and sexual obsession.
The 19th century did not live with more anguish because of its sexual
repression than the 20th century with its sexual liberation.
Identical obsession, even when the symptoms are the opposite.
The problem is not sexual repression, nor sexual liberation, but sex.
It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals.