Biography
"Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes. This faculty of wonder … is the one which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary."
"The select man is not the petulant person who thinks himself superior to the rest, but the man who demands more of himself than the rest."
"The present-day writer, when he takes his pen in hand to treat a subject which he has studied deeply, has to bear in mind that the average reader, who has never concerned himself with this subject, if he reads does so with the view, not of learning something from the writer, but rather, of pronouncing judgment on him when he is not in agreement with the commonplaces that the said reader carries in his head. If the individuals who make up the mass believed themselves specially qualified, it would be a case merely of personal error, not a sociological subversion. The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will."
"The average type of European at present possesses a soul, healthier and stronger it is true than those of the last century, but much more simple. Hence, at times he leaves the impression of a primitive man suddenly risen in the midst of a very old civilization. In the schools, which were such a source of pride in the last century, it has been impossible to do more than instruct the masses in the technique of modern life; it has been found impossible to educate them. They … have been hurriedly inoculated with the pride and power of modern instruments, but not with their spirit."
"There are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years’ time be more comfortable and cheaper than today. They believe in this as they believe the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice."
"For me, then, nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation. In this way the noble life stands opposed to the common or inert life, which reclines statically upon itself, condemned to perpetual immobility, unless an external force compels it to come out of itself. Hence we apply the term mass to this kind of man—not so much because of his multitude as because of his inertia."
"The individual finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete. As he feels the lack of nothing outside himself, he settles down definitely amid his mental furniture. Such is the mechanism of self-obliteration."
"The man of sense … is constantly catching himself within an inch of being a fool; hence he makes an effort to escape from the imminent folly, and in that effort lies his intelligence. The fool, on the other hand, does not suspect himself; he thinks himself the most prudent of men, hence the enviable tranquility with which the fool settles down, installs himself with his own folly."
"There is no way of dislodging the fool from his folly, to take him away for a while from his blind state and to force him to contrast his own dull vision with other keener forms of sight. The fool is a fool for life; he is devoid of pores."
"The mass man … accepts the stock of commonplaces, prejudices, fag-ends of ideas or simply empty words which chance has piled within his mind, and with a boldness only explicable by his ingenuousness, is prepared to impose them everywhere."
"It is painful to hear relatively cultured people speak concerning the most elementary problems of the day. They seem like rough farmhands trying with thick, clumsy fingers to pick up a needle lying on a table."
"When by 1890 a third generation assumes intellectual command in Europe we meet with a type of scientist unparalleled in history. He is one who, out of all that has to be known in order to be a man of judgment, is only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator. He even proclaims it as a virtue that he takes no cognizance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of “dilettantism” to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge."
"Experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre … to obtain quite abundant results it is not even necessary to have rigorous notions of their meaning and foundations."
"This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: state intervention."
"The majority of men have no opinions, and these have to be pumped into them from outside, like lubricants into machinery."
"This degradation is nothing else than the acceptance, as a normal, constituted condition, of an irregularity, of something which, though accepted, is still regarded as not right. As it is impossible to change into healthy normality what is of its essence unhealthy and abnormal,. the individual decides to adapt himself to the thing that is wrong, making himself part of the crime of irregularity. It is a mechanism similar to that indicated by the popular saying, “One lie make a hundred.”"
"The apparent egoism of great nations and great men is the inevitable sternness with which anyone who has his life fixed on some undertaking must bear himself. When we are really going to do something and have dedicated ourselves to a purpose, we cannot be expected to be ready at hand to look after every passer-by and to lend ourselves to every chance display of altruism."
"A creative life implies a regime of strict mental health, of high conduct, of constant stimulus, which keep active the consciousness of man’s dignity."
"Take stock of those around you and you will see them wandering about lost through life, like sleep-walkers in the midst of their good or evil fortune, without the slightest suspicion of what is happening to them. You will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."
"The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from these fantastic “ideas” and looks life in the face, realizes that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. This is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce."
"He who does not really feel himself lost, is lost without remission; that is to say, he never finds himself, never comes up against his own reality."
"The majority of men of science have given themselves to it through fear of facing life. They are not clear heads; hence their notorious ineptitude in the presence of any concrete situation."
"Our scientific ideas are of value to the degree to which we have felt ourselves lost before a question; have seen its problematic nature, and have realized that we cannot find support in received notions, in prescriptions, proverbs, mere words."
"The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes."