The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again...
The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall...
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue,...
Intelligence is the inborn capacity to see, to perceive. Every child is born intelligent, then made stupid by the society. We educate him in stupidity. Sooner or later he graduates in stupidity. Have you ever come across a child who is stupid? It is impossible! But...
Assume that your activities depend on a Black Swan surprise—i.e., you are a reverse turkey. Intellectual, scientific, and artistic activities belong to the province of Extremistan, where there is a severe concentration of success, with a very small number of winners claiming a large share...
When he is young, a man of noble character fancies that the relations prevailing amongst mankind, and the alliances to which these relations lead, are at bottom and essentially, ideal in their nature; that is to say, that they rest upon similarity of disposition or...
The wretched condition of most persons physically, morally, and intellectually may be partly accounted for by the fact that marriages are not generally the result of pure choice and inclination, but of all kinds of external considerations and accidental circumstances. However, if inclination to a...
Really, there is nobody living about whom I care much. The people I like have been dead for a long, long time – for example, the Abbé Galiani, or Henri Beyle, or Montaigne. He could have added another hero, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. These four men were perhaps...
Is economics a science? The short answer is no. Economics acts like a science and quacks like one—it has developed an impressive mathematical apparatus and awards itself a Nobel Prize each year—but it is not yet a science. It fails to ground itself in underlying...
As a psychotherapist who works not only with individuals, but also with couples, I have witnessed a great deal of marital carnage over the last thirty years. Each week, wives and husbands, long-term girlfriends and boyfriends, as well as gay or lesbian partners, come to...
