Par Excellence Quotes

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Every kind of contempt for sex, every impurification of it by means of the concept "impure", is the crime par excellence against life--is the real sin against the holy spirit of life

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. ... An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.

Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.

Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved. But love goes beyond the beloved... The possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity, or again,the possibility of enjoying the Other... this simultaneity of need and desire, or concupiscence and transcendence,... constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence.

Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.

Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.

She was indeed the literature I thought she would be, on par with excellence and not-so-readable.

Why tinker with the plain truth that we hurry the darker races to their graves in order to take their land & its riches? Wolves don’t sit in their caves, concocting crapulous theories of race to justify devouring a flock of sheep! “Intellectual courage”? True “intellectual courage” is to dispense with these fig leaves & admit all peoples are predatory, but White predators, with our deadly duet of disease dust & firearms, are examplars of predacity par excellence, & what of it?

When the Christian crusaders in the Orient came across that invincible order of Assassins – that order of free spirits par excellence whose lowest order received, through some channel or other, a hint about that symbol and spell reserved for the uppermost echelons alone, as their secret: "nothing is true, everything is permitted". Now that was freedom of the spirit, with that, belief in truth itself was renounced.

Topical preaching, polemical preaching, historical preaching, and other forms of sermonic output have, one supposes, their rightful and opportune uses. But expository preaching—the prayerful expounding of the Word of God is preaching that is preaching—pulpit effort par excellence.

Read from a distant star the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps tempt one to conclude that the earth is the ascetic planet par excellence, a nook of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures who could not get rid of a deep displeasure with themselves, with the earth, with all life and who caused themselves as much pain as possible out of pleasure in causing pain:―probably their only pleasure.

The jet is a great invention. Besides being a world shrinker, par excellence, it has much of the quality and charm of a roller coaster. And it's big. Once, years ago, on a ten-stop, cross-country air trip, I turned to the man next to me and said, quite genuinely: "What keeps these big goddam things up in the air?

One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. Experiences and aspirations of which intimations may be found in Plato, Nietzsche, and Spinoza have found their most evocative expression in some sacred books. Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.

Faith is always coveted most and needed most urgently where will is lacking; for will, as the affect of command, is the decisive sign of sovereignty and strength. In other words, the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. From this one might perhaps gather that the two world religions, Buddhism and Christianity, may have owed their origin and above all their sudden spread to a tremendous collapse and disease of the will. And that is what actually happened: both religions encountered a situation in which the will had become diseased, giving rise to a demand that had become utterly desperate for some "thou shalt." Both religions taught fanaticism in ages in which the will had become exhausted, and thus they offered innumerable people some support, a new possibility of willing, some delight in willing. For fanaticism is the only "strength of the will" that even the weak and insecure can be brought to attain, being a sort of hypnotism of the whole system of the senses and the intellect for the benefit of an excessive nourishment (hypertrophy) of a single point of view and feeling that henceforth becomes dominant— which the Christian calls his faith. Once a human being reaches the fundamental conviction that he must be commanded, he becomes "a believer." Conversely, one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will [ This conception of "freedom of the will" ( alias, autonomy) does not involve any belief in what Nietzsche called "the superstition of free will" in section 345 ( alias, the exemption of human actions from an otherwise universal determinism).] that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence.

And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff--no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people--one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion of the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.

Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori, (by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections. And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs (Red orchestra, White Rose, the men and women of July 20), and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were. Who somebody really was. That was the Zone of interest.

The marriage of Zeus and Hera can hardly be reframed into a "happy one" and yet Hera is the Goddess of marriage. Hera and Zeus could be described as quarrelsome predecessors of the Holy Family. For the Greeks they symbolized marriage par excellence.

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald’s contemporaries couldn’t bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

While the Archons cannot physically touchdown on Planet Earth, they can project their thoughts telepathically and their images holographically. They are experts in creating simulations of all kinds, inverting and distorting your perception and in this way, they create an Archontic Inversion. Archons are deceivers par excellence. They live in hive-like structures. They are more like robots than living beings, as they lack intentionality and imagination. In other words, they follow orders like an army of automatons.

C'est l'imparfait par excellence.

If we are to wield great magic, then let us learn from great teachers: the alchemists -- magicians par excellence.

The most prostituted being, the Being par excellence, is God, since He is the supreme friend to every individual; since He is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.

Every anomaly seduces us, Life in the first place, that anomaly par excellence.

When the Christian Crusaders in the East came into collision with that invincible order of assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence, whose lowest grade lives in a state of discipline such as no order of monks has ever attained, then in some way or other they managed to get an inkling of that symbol and tally- word, that was reserved for the highest grade alone as their secretum, "Nothing is true, everything is allowed," — in sooth, that was freedom of thought, thereby was taking leave of the very belief in truth.

Music is the 'pure' art par excellence. It says nothing and has nothing to say. Never really having an expressive function, it is opposed to drama, which even in its most refined forms still bears a social message and can only be 'put over' on the basis of an immediate and profound affinity with the values and expectations of its audience. The theatre divides its public and divides itself. The Parisian opposition between right-bank and left-bank theatr, bourgeois theatre and avant-garde theatre, is inextricably aesthetic and political.

The nice people do not come to God, because they think they are good through their own merits or bad through inherited instincts. If they do good, they believe they are to receive the credit for it; if they do evil, they deny that it is their own fault. They are good through their own goodheartedness, they say; but they are bad because they are misfortunate, either in their economic life or through an inheritance of evil genes from their grandparents. The nice people rarely come to God; they take their moral tone from the society in which they live. Like the Pharisee in front of the temple, they believe themselves to be very respectable citizens. Elegance is their test of virtue; to them, the moral is the aesthetic, the evil is the ugly. Every move they make is dictated, not by a love of goodness, but by the influence of their age. Their intellects are cultivated—in knowledge of current events; they read only the bestsellers, but their hearts are undisciplined. They say that they would go to church if the Church were only better—but they never tell you how much better the Church must be before they will join it. They sometimes condemn the gross sins of society, such as murder; they are not tempted to these because they fear the opprobrium which comes to them who commit them. By avoiding the sins which society condemns, they escape reproach, they consider themselves good par excellence.

Mediocrity naturally feels threatened in the presence of merit.

The story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 1o) can he interpreted mystically in such a way that the question of the knowledge of God becomes its focus. The priest and the Levite, who walk past the man who fell among robbers and was seriously hurt, are pious God-fearing persons. They "know" God and the law of God. They have God the same way that the one who knows has that which is known. They know what God wants them to be and do. They also know where God is to he found, in the scriptures and the cult of the temple. For them, God is mediated through the existing institutions. They have their God - one who is not to he found on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho. What is wrong with this knowledge of God? The problem is not the knowledge of the Torah or the knowledge of the temple. (It is absurd to read an anti-Judaistic meaning into a story of the Jew Jesus, since it could just as well have come from Hillel or another Jewish teacher.) What is false is a knowledge of God that does not allow for any unknowing or any negative theology. Because both actors know that God is "this," they do not see "that." Hence the Good Samaritan is the anti-fundamentalist story par excellence. "And so I ask God to rid me of God," Meister Eckhart says. The God who is known and familiar is too small for him.

Nothing burns one up faster than the affects of ressentiment. Anger, pathological vulnerability, impotent lust for revenge, thirst for revenge, poison-mixing in any sense—no reaction could be more disadvantageous for the exhausted: such affects involve a rapid consumption of nervous energy, a pathological increase of harmful excretions—for example, of the gall bladder into the stomach. Ressentiment is what is forbidden par excellence for the sick—it is their specific evil—unfortunately also their most natural inclination.

In philosophy, phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Wine blind tasting is the best phenomenology, phenomenology par excellence, returning us from our heads into the world, and, at the same time, teaching us the methods of the mind.

However, of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.

The ultimate expression of this Christian attitude toward the power of money is what we will call profanation. To profane money, like all other powers, is to take away its sacred character.... Giving to God is the act of profanation par excellence.... We need to regain an appreciation of gifts that are not utilitarian. We should meditate on the story in the Gospel of John where Mary wastes precious ointment on Jesus. The one who protests against this free gift is Judas. He would have preferred it to be used for good works, for the poor. He wanted such an enormous sum of money to be spent usefully. Giving to God introduces the useless into the world of efficiency, and this is an essential witness to faith in today's world.

Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far―and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning! It was the only meaning offered so far; any meaning is better than none at all; the ascetic ideal was in every sense the "faute de mieux" par excellence so far. In it, suffering was interpreted; the tremendous void seemed to have been filled; the door was closed to any kind of suicidal nihilism. This interpretation - there is no doubt of it - brought fresh suffering with it, deeper, more inward, more poisonous, more life-destructive suffering: it placed all suffering under the perspective of guilt. But all this notwithstanding - man was saved thereby, he possessed a meaning, he was henceforth no longer 1ike a leaf in the wind, a plaything of nonsense - the "sense-less" - he could now willsomething; no matter at first to what end, why, with what he willed: the will itself was saved. We can no longer conceal from ourselves what is expressed by all that willing which has taken its direction from the ascetic ideal: this hatred of the human, and even more of the animal, and more still of the material, this horror of the senses, of reason itself, this fear of happiness and beauty, this longing to get away from all appearance, change, becoming, death, wishing, from longing itself. All this means - let us dare to grasp it - a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life; but it is and remains a will. Man would rather will nothingness than not will at all.

The commodity traders are arbitragers par excellence, trying to exploit a series of differences in prices. Because they’re doing deals to buy and to sell all the time, they are often indifferent to whether commodity prices overall go up or down. What matters to them is the price disparity – between different locations, different qualities or forms of a product, and different delivery dates. By exploiting these price differences, they help to make markets more efficient, directing resources to their highest value uses in response to price signals. They are, in the words of one academic, the visible manifestation of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

The morality that would un-self man is the morality of decline par excellence—the fact, "I am declining," transposed into the imperative, "all of you ought to decline"—and not only into the imperative... This only morality that has been taught so far, that of un-selfing, reveals a will to the end; fundamentally, it negates life.

The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it - mathematics is the abstract par excellence, which is indeed its glory and the reason for its great usefulness.

The peculiar, withdrawn attitude of the philosopher, world denying, hostile to life, suspicious of the senses, freed from sensuality, which has been maintained down to the most modern times and has become virtually the philosopher’s pose par excellence—is above all a result of the emergency conditions under which philosophy arose and survived at all; for the longest time, philosophy would not have been possible at all on earth without ascetic wraps and cloaks, without an ascetic self-misunderstanding. To put it vividly: the ascetic priest provided until the most modern times the repulsive and gloomy caterpillar form in which alone the philosopher could live and creep about.

And in the whale he created the symbol par excellence of malevolent power at work in an indifferent universe

When I say "intellect" I will include will. Attention is an act of will. Intelligence in action is will par excellence. What seemed to meet me was full of resolution.

This, I did not need telling, was Anthony Blanche, the “aesthete” par excellence, a byword of iniquity from Cherwell Edge to Somerville.

And once we cease to value the public over the private, surely we shall come in time to have difficulty seeing just why we should value law (the public good par excellence) over force.

Moreover, it is not entirely without significance that true love was, in Platonic philosophy -- but also, as you know, in a whole sector, a whole domain of Christian spirituality and mysticism -- the form par excellence of the true life. Since Platonism, true love and the true life have traditionally belonged together, and to a large extend Christian Platonism will take up this theme.

an American individualist par excellence was once again so savagely traduced by friends and neighbors that he lived estranged from them until his death, robbed of his moral authority by their moral stupidity.

This kind of understanding—seeing the world (as we rather tritely say today) from the other fellow's point of view—is the political kind of insight par excellence. If we wanted to define, traditionally, the one outstanding virtue of the statesman, we could say that it consists in understanding the greatest possible number and variety of realities—not of subjective viewpoints, which of course also exist but which do not concern us here—as those realities open themselves up to the various opinions of citizens; and, at the same time, in being able to communicate between the citizens and their opinions so that the commonness of this world becomes apparent.

Non sono mai nato, non mi vergogno di essere nell'equivoco italiota, non mi interessano gli italiani. Qualunque governo come qualunque arte (o tutta l'arte borghese), tutta l'arte è rappresentazione di Stato, è statale. È uno stato che si assiste fin troppo, se no alla mediocrità chi ci pensa? La mediocrità, par excellence, è proprio lo Stato. Lo Stato dovrebbe smetterla di governare, ecco. Si può dare uno Stato senza governo, mi spiego? Non deve amministrare, deve lasciarlo fare a dei privati.

Literature, as an institution par excellence of memory and a universally employed mode of human expression, untiringly explores ways of articulating who we are and of understanding both the incommensurability and the interconnectedness of our histories.

Hawking’s inadequate view of God could well be linked with his attitude to philosophy in general. He writes: “Philosophy is dead.”9 But this itself is a philosophical statement. It is manifestly not a statement of science. Therefore, because it says that philosophy is dead, it contradicts itself. It is a classic example of logical incoherence. Not only that: Hawking’s book, insofar as it is interpreting and applying science to ultimate questions like the existence of God, is a book about metaphysics — philosophy par excellence.

If Samkhya-Yoga philosophy does not explain the reason and origin of the strange partnership between the spirit and experience, at least tries to explain the nature of their association, to define the character of their mutual relations. These are not real relationships, in the true sense of the word, such as exist for example between external objects and perceptions. The true relations imply, in effect, change and plurality, however, here we have some rules essentially opposed to the nature of spirit. “States of consciousness” are only products of prakriti and can have no kind of relation with Spirit the latter, by its very essence, being above all experience. However and for SamPhya and Yoga this is the key to the paradoxical situation the most subtle, most transparent part of mental life, that is, intelligence (buddhi) in its mode of pure luminosity (sattva), has a specific quality that of reflecting Spirit. Comprehension of the external world is possible only by virtue of this reflection of purusha in intelligence. But the Self is not corrupted by this reflection and does not lose its ontological modalities (impassibility, eternity, etc.). The Yoga-sutras (II, 20) say in substance: seeing (drashtri; i.e., purusha) is absolute consciousness (“sight par excellence”) and, while remaining pure, it knows cognitions (it “looks at the ideas that are presented to it”). Vyasa interprets: Spirit is reflected in intelligence (buddhi), but is neither like it nor different from it. It is not like intelligence because intelligence is modified by knowledge of objects, which knowledge is ever-changing whereas purusha commands uninterrupted knowledge, in some sort it is knowledge. On the other hand, purusha is not completely different from buddhi, for, although it is pure, it knows knowledge. Patanjali employs a different image to define the relationship between Spirit and intelligence: just as a flower is reflected in a crystal, intelligence reflects purusha. But only ignorance can attribute to the crystal the qualities of the flower (form, dimensions, colors). When the object (the flower) moves, its image moves in the crystal, though the latter remains motionless. It is an illusion to believe that Spirit is dynamic because mental experience is so. In reality, there is here only an illusory relation (upadhi) owing to a “sympathetic correspondence” (yogyata) between the Self and intelligence.

Innovations are always necessarily gradual and incremental, building on the accumulated insights of past humans. We are the cultural animal par excellence, and our ability to share the products of our individual creativity and pass them on to future generations is the key to our ecological dominance.30

As good heirs of the Bible, we think that a great misfortune necessarily follows a great infraction. In this respect the intellectual caste, in our world, is the penitential class par excellence, continuing the role of the clergy under the Old Regime. We have to call its members what they are: officials of original sin.

The book, then, taken as a whole, is the poem both of Personality and of Democracy; and, it may be added, of American nationalism. It is par excellence the modern poem. It is distinguished also by this peculiarity— that in it the most literal view of things is continually merging into the most rhapsodic or passionately abstract.

God is an artist par excellence. He has painted the picturesque universe on the screen of His own immutable and glowing Spirit. So He is at once the painter and the painted. In the ultimate analysis, God and His lover, God and His devotee and servant, are He. The unmanifest--which is beyond all duality has become both. This secret few know.

But Rousseau — to what did he really want to return? Rousseau, this first modern man, idealist and rabble in one person — one who needed moral "dignity" to be able to stand his own sight, sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt. This miscarriage, couched on the threshold of modern times, also wanted a "return to nature"; to ask this once more, to what did Rousseau want to return? I still hate Rousseau in the French Revolution: it is the world-historical expression of this duality of idealist and rabble. The bloody farce which became an aspect of the Revolution, its "immorality," is of little concern to me: what I hate is its Rousseauan morality — the so-called "truths" of the Revolution through which it still works and attracts everything shallow and mediocre. The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere: for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the termination of justice. "Equal to the equal, unequal to the unequal" — that would be the true slogan of justice; and also its corollary: "Never make equal what is unequal." That this doctrine of equality was surrounded by such gruesome and bloody events, that has given this "modern idea" par excellence a kind of glory and fiery aura so that the Revolution as a spectacle has seduced even the noblest spirits. In the end, that is no reason for respecting it any more. I see only one man who experienced it as it must be experienced, with nausea — Goethe. Goethe — not a German event, but a European one: a magnificent attempt to overcome the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to the naturalness of the Renaissance — a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century. He bore its strongest instincts within himself: the sensibility, the idolatry of nature, the anti-historic, the idealistic, the unreal and revolutionary (the latter being merely a form of the unreal). He sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he if was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will (preached with the most abhorrent scholasticism by Kant, the antipode of Goethe); he disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect — and he had no greater experience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength, because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden — unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. 50 One might say that in a certain sense the nineteenth century also strove for all that which Goethe as a person had striven for: universality in understanding and in welcoming, letting everything come close to oneself, an audacious realism, a reverence for everything factual.

un de ces hommes qui atteignent un tel degré d’excellence à vingt et un ans, dans un domaine par ailleurs limité, que tout, après cela, ne peut avoir qu’un goût de défaite.

Enfermé dans le navire, d’où on n’échappe pas, le fou est confié à la rivière aux mille bras, à la mer aux mille chemins, à cette grande incertitude extérieure à tout. Il est prisonnier au milieu de la plus libre, de la plus ouverte des routes : solidement enchaîné à l’infini carrefour. Il est le Passager par excellence, c’est-à-dire le prisonnier du Passage.

The world currently has two reasonably disturbing and disturbingly reasonable examples as to what this unraveling might look like: Zimbabwe and Venezuela. In both cases mismanagement par excellence destroyed the ability of both countries to produce their for-export goods—foodstuffs in the case of Zimbabwe, oil and oil products in the case of Venezuela—resulting in funds shortages so extreme, the ability of the countries to import largely collapsed. In Zimbabwe, the end result was more than a decade of negative economic growth, generating outcomes far worse than those of the Great Depression, with the bulk of the population reduced to subsistence farming. Venezuela wasn’t so . . . fortunate. It imported more than two-thirds of its foodstuffs before its economic collapse. Venezuelan oil production dropped so much, the country even lacks sufficient fuel to sow crops, contributing to the worst famine in the history of the Western Hemisphere. I don’t use these examples lightly. The word you are looking for to describe this outcome isn’t “deglobalize” or even “deindustrialize,” but instead “decivilize.

The space-time quaternio is the archetypal sine qua non for any apprehension of the physical world—indeed, the very possibility of apprehending it. It is the organizing schema par excellence among the psychic quaternities. In its structure it corresponds to the psychological schema of the functions.93 The 3 : 1 proportion frequently occurs in dreams and in spontaneous mandala-drawings.

Empirically, things are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humorous, settled, disturbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling, splendid, fearful; are such immediately and in their own right and behalf.... These traits stand in themselves on precisely the same level as colours, sounds, qualities of contact, taste and smell. Any criterion that finds the latter to be ultimate and "hard" data will, impartially applied, come to the same conclusion about the former. -Any- quality as such is final; it is at once initial and terminal; just what it is as it exists. it may be referred to other things, it may be treated as an effect or a sign. But this involves an extraneous extension and use. It takes us beyond quality in its immediate qualitativeness.... The surrender of immediate qualities, sensory and significant, as objects of science, and as proper forms of classification and understanding, left in reality these immediate qualities just as they were; since they are -had- there is no need to -know- them. But... the traditional view that the object of knowledge is reality par excellence led to the conclusion that the object of science was preeminently metaphysically real. Hence, immediate qualities, being extended from the object of science, were left thereby hanging loose from the "real" object. Since their -existence- could not be denied, they were gathered together into a psychic realm of being, set over against the object of physics. Given this premise, all the problems regarding the relation of mind and matter, the psychic and the bodily, necessarily follow. Change the metaphysical premise; restore, that is to say, immediate qualities to their rightful position as qualities of inclusive situations, and the problems in question cease to be epistemological problems. They become specifiable scientific problems; questions, that is to say, of how such and such an event having such and such qualities actually occurs.

Priests in particular ought to carry them in their heart when they climb the steps to the altar. They must remember that at the altar they are facing God. At Mass, the priest is not a professor who gives a lecture while using the altar as a podium centered on the microphone instead of the Cross. The altar is the sacred threshold par excellence, the place of the face-to-face encounter with God.

Frédéric pensait à la chambre qu’il occuperait là-bas, au plan d’un drame, à des sujets de tableaux, à des passions futures. Il trouvait que le bonheur mérité par l’excellence de son âme tardait à venir.

Her pretty name of Adina seemed to me to have somehow a mystic fitness to her personality. Behind a cold shyness, there seemed to lurk a tremulous promise to be franker when she knew you better. Adina is a strange child; she is fanciful without being capricious. She was stout and fresh-coloured, she laughed and talked rather loud, and generally, in galleries and temples, caused a good many stiff British necks to turn round. She had a mania for excursions, and at Frascati and Tivoli she inflicted her good-humoured ponderosity on diminutive donkeys with a relish which seemed to prove that a passion for scenery, like all our passions, is capable of making the best of us pitiless. Adina may not have the shoulders of the Venus of Milo...but I hope it will take more than a bauble like this to make her stoop. Adina espied the first violet of the year glimmering at the root of a cypress. She made haste to rise and gather it, and then wandered further, in the hope of giving it a few companions. Scrope sat and watched her as she moved slowly away, trailing her long shadow on the grass and drooping her head from side to side in her charming quest. It was not, I know, that he felt no impulse to join her; but that he was in love, for the moment, with looking at her from where he sat. Her search carried her some distance and at last she passed out of sight behind a bend in the villa wall. I don't pretend to be sure that I was particularly struck, from this time forward, with something strange in our quiet Adina. She had always seemed to me vaguely, innocently strange; it was part of her charm that in the daily noiseless movement of her life a mystic undertone seemed to murmur "You don't half know me! Perhaps we three prosaic mortals were not quite worthy to know her: yet I believe that if a practised man of the world had whispered to me, one day, over his wine, after Miss Waddington had rustled away from the table, that there was a young lady who, sooner or later, would treat her friends to a first class surprise, I should have laid my finger on his sleeve and told him with a smile that he phrased my own thought. .."That beautiful girl," I said, "seems to me agitated and preoccupied." "That beautiful girl is a puzzle. I don't know what's the matter with her; it's all very painful; she's a very strange creature. I never dreamed there was an obstacle to our happiness--to our union. She has never protested and promised; it's not her way, nor her nature; she is always humble, passive, gentle; but always extremely grateful for every sign of tenderness. Till within three or four days ago, she seemed to me more so than ever; her habitual gentleness took the form of a sort of shrinking, almost suffering, deprecation of my attentions, my petits soins, my lovers nonsense. It was as if they oppressed and mortified her--and she would have liked me to bear more lightly. I did not see directly that it was not the excess of my devotion, but my devotion itself--the very fact of my love and her engagement that pained her. When I did it was a blow in the face. I don't know what under heaven I've done! Women are fathomless creatures. And yet Adina is not capricious, in the common sense... .So these are peines d'amour?" he went on, after brooding a moment. "I didn't know how fiercely I was in love!" Scrope stood staring at her as she thrust out the crumpled note: that she meant that Adina--that Adina had left us in the night--was too large a horror for his unprepared sense...."Good-bye to everything! Think me crazy if you will. I could never explain. Only forget me and believe that I am happy, happy, happy! Adina Beati."... Love is said to be par excellence the egotistical passion; if so Adina was far gone. "I can't promise to forget you," I said; "you and my friend here deserve to be remembered!

The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract, let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometime indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.

Commenting acidly on a writer whom I perhaps too naively admired, my old classics teacher put on his best sneer to ask: 'Wouldn't you say, Hitchens, that his writing was somewhat journalistic?' This lofty schoolmaster employed my name sarcastically, and stressed the last term as if he meant it to sting, and it rankled even more than he had intended. Later on in life, I found that I still used to mutter and improve my long-meditated reply. Émile Zola—a journalist. Charles Dickens—a journalist. Thomas Paine—another journalist. Mark Twain. Rudyard Kipling. George Orwell—a journalist par excellence. Somewhere in my cortex was the idea to which Orwell himself once gave explicit shape: the idea that 'mere' writing of this sort could aspire to become an art, and that the word 'journalist'—like the ironic modern English usage of the word 'hack'—could lose its association with the trivial and the evanescent.

In hyperbolic tones he listed the catastrophes that in his view were approaching: one, the decline of the revolutionary subject par excellence, the working class; two, the definitive dispersion of the political patrimony of socialists and Communists, who were already perverted by their daily quarrel over which was playing the role of capital’s crutch; three, the end of every hypothesis of change, what was there was there and we would have to adapt to it.

En pleine discussion avec mon père à propos d'un nouveau modèle de voiture, Joshua n'avait pas encore terminé son assiette. Je fis un effort pour écouter là conversation, mais le morceau de tarte abandonné de mon mâle m'hypnotisait plus sûrement qu'un pendule et, manque de chance, les voitures ne m'intéressaient pas. Pourtant, si j'en croyais ma mère, l'automobile représentait l'invention Daïerwolf par excellence : cent-dix chevaux sous le capot, un âne au volant.

I have said that people are rendered sociable by their ability to endure solitude, that is to say, their own society. They become sick of themselves. It is this vacuity of soul which drives them to intercourse with others,—to travels in foreign countries. Their mind is wanting in elasticity; it has no movement of its own, and so they try to give it some,—by drink, for instance. How much drunkenness is due to this cause alone! They are always looking for some form of excitement, of the strongest kind they can bear—the excitement of being with people of like nature with themselves; and if they fail in this, their mind sinks by its own weight, and they fall into a grievous lethargy.[1] Such people, it may be said, possess only a small fraction of humanity in themselves; and it requires a great many of them put together to make up a fair amount of it,—to attain any degree of consciousness as men. A man, in the full sense of the word,—a man par excellence—does not represent a fraction, but a whole number: he is complete in himself. [Footnote

These newts are one of the only amphibians to contain a ferromagnetic mineral in their bodies, and that, combined with their incredible capacity to memorize sun- and starlight patterns to return to their original pond waters, make them an animal on par with salmon for their excellent homing capabilities. What’s particularly amazing is that in its lifetime—thanks to its innate magnetic compass—a newt usually doesn’t stray farther than just over a mile from its original pond, staying within the range of about eighteen football fields.

Attestant la présence massive d’athées, il recherche les causes de cette incroyance, à ses yeux dangereuse, et préconise de sévères mesures à l’encontre des athées. À bien des égards, on peut estimer que Platon est à l’origine de l’opinion péjorative qui va peser sur l’athéisme pendant deux milles ans : en liant l’incroyance et l’immoralité, il franchit un pas décisif qui frappe les athées d’une tache indélébile. — Platon va l’enraciner dans une conception métaphysique et éthique fondamentale qui va en faire le crime par excellence.

century were born of this catastrophe; it was, as the American historian Fritz Stern put it, ‘the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang’. 1 The debate over why it happened began before the first shots were fired and has been running ever since. It has spawned an historical literature of unparalleled size, sophistication and moral intensity. For international relations theorists the events of 1914 remain the political crisis par excellence, intricate enough to accommodate any number of hypotheses.

I refer to Arendt who argued that this first condition is the most important: “The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships.”18 This deterioration of social connectedness leads to the second condition: lack of meaning in life. This second condition follows mainly from the first. Man, as a social being par excellence, lives for the Other. Remove the bond with the Other and he will experience his life as meaningless (whether he sees the connection with his loneliness or not).

To leave the household, originally in order to embark upon some adventure and glorious enterprise and later simply to devote one’s life to the affairs of the city, demanded courage because only in the household was one primarily concerned with one’s own life and survival. Whoever entered the political realm had first to be ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed freedom, was a sure sign of slavishness.30 Courage therefore became the political virtue par excellence, and only those men who possessed it could be admitted to a fellowship that was political in content and purpose and thereby transcended the mere togetherness imposed on all—slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike—through the urgencies of life.31 The “good life,” as Aristotle called the life of the citizen, therefore was not merely better, more carefree or nobler than ordinary life, but of an altogether different quality. It was “good” to the extent that by having mastered the necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labor and work, and by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process. At

The metaverse is, par excellence, the ultimate ANTI-travel dystopia. Well, at least on paper. Cambridge Dictionary defines travel as "to make a journey, usually over a long distance." In the metaverse, au contraire, there are no distances at all. The central concept of space is nonsensical in a virtual environment. That's why most people in our industry are still skeptical of its practical applications: if you erase one essential part (the distance) from the travel equation, only the journey remains. And so does the question: is traveling without moving, still traveling? Or is it something else?

The Caucasus mountain range is probably the most variegated ethnological and linguistic area in the world. It is not a melting pot, as has been said, but a refuge area par excellence where small groups have maintained their identity throughout history. The descendants of the Mediaeval Alans, a Scythic Iranian people, live in the north Caucasus today and are called Ossetes. Iranian cultural influences were strong among the Armenians, Georgians and other peoples of the Caucasus and many times in history large parts of this area were under Persian rule. So it well deserves to be mentioned in a survey of Iran.

Le monde est désormais habité par des êtres horriblement indépendants, complexés, insatisfaits ; des amoureux incapables d'aimer, des moutons qui refusent d'être des moutons, mais broutent quand même en se fantasmant à l'écart du troupeau ; bref, d'excellents clients pour Freud, Bouddha, Fashion TV et Facebook.

I. IDEAS A. The Death Instinct and the Life Instinct: The Death Instinct: separation, individuality, Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s own path—do your own thing; dynamic change. The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetuation and MAINTENANCE of the species; survival systems and operations, equilibrium.26 The life force is concerned with cyclicality, care, and regeneration; the death force sounds to me a lot like “disrupt.” Obviously, some amount of both is necessary, but one is routinely valorized, not to mention masculinized, while the other goes unrecognized because it has no part in “progress.

Ce qui commence par : "Je me hâtais de déplaire exprès, par crainte de déplaire naturellement" (Mauriac) continue par : "Je me hâtais d'échouer exprès,par crainte d'échouer naturellement", et pourrait se terminer un jour par : "Je me hâtais de mourir exprès,par crainte de mourir naturellement" (une phrase d'excellent comique).

La guerre, c'est la discipline. La sujétion maximale. L'esclavage. C'est l'une des situations où l'homme est le plus soumis à l'homme et a le moins d'issues pour y échapper. Il est empoigné. Réquisitionné. Ballotté par des ordres mécaniques. Objet d'un sadisme sans réplique. Exposé à l'humiliation ou au feu. Numéroté. Broyé. Astreint à la corvée. Pris dans des mouvements collectifs très lents, très obscurs, parfaitement indéchiffrables, qui, au plus naturellement rebelle, ne laissent d'autre choix que de se plier. La guerre c'est la circonstance, par excellence, où joue ce pouvoir de laisser vivre et de faire mourir qui est, selon les bons philosophes, le propre du pouvoir absolu. L'homme de guerre c'est le dernier des hommes, c'est-à-dire l'esclave absolu. (ch. 12 Les mots de la guerre)

Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. However, of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought. The

Finding oneself means, among other things, finding the story or narrative in terms of which one's life make sense. [...] In most societies in world history, the meaning of one's life has derived to a large degree from one's relationship to the lives of one's parents and one's children. [...] Clearly, the meaning of one's life for most Americans is to become one's own person, almost to give birth to oneself. Much of this process, as we have seen, is negative. It involves breaking free from family, community, and inherited ideas. Our culture does not give us much guidance as to how to fill the contours of this autonomous, self-responsible self, but it does point to two important areas. One of these is work, the realm, par excellence, of utilitarian individualism. [...] The other area is the lifestyle enclave, the realm, par excellence, of expressive individualism.

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

In 1604, at the height of his scientific career, Galileo argued that for a rectilinear motion in which speed increases proportionally to distance covered, the law of motion should be just that (x = ct^2) which he had discovered in the investigation of falling bodies. Between 1695 and 1700 not a single one of the monthly issues of Leipzig’s Acta Eruditorum was published without articles of Leibniz, the Bernoulli brothers or the Marquis de l'Hôpital treating, with notation only slightly different from that which we use today, the most varied problems of differential calculus, integral calculus and the calculus of variations. Thus in the space of almost precisely one century infinitesimal calculus or, as we now call it in English, The Calculus, the calculating tool par excellence, had been forged; and nearly three centuries of constant use have not completely dulled this incomparable instrument.

Being taken simply, as including all perfection of being, surpasses life and all that follows it; for thus being itself includes all these. And in this sense Dionysius speaks. But if we consider being itself as participated in this or that thing, which does not possess the whole perfection of being, but has imperfect being, such as the being of any creature; then it is evident that being itself together with an additional perfection is more excellent. Hence in the same passage Dionysius says that things that live are better than things that exist, and intelligent better than living things. Reply Obj. 3: Since the end corresponds to the beginning; this argument proves that the last end is the first beginning of being, in Whom every perfection of being is: Whose likeness, according to their proportion, some desire as to being only, some as to living being, some as to being which is living, intelligent and happy. And this belongs to few.

Je comprends. On a placé ta froide main dans la main du vassal insolent, décoré des pouvoirs du maître ; la royale procuration, sanctionnée par l’officieux chapelain de Son Excellence, a réuni aux yeux du monde deux êtres inconnus l’un à l’autre. Je suis au fait de ces cérémonies. Et toi, ton coeur, ta tête, ta vie, marchandés par entremetteurs, tout a été vendu au plus offrant ; une couronne de reine t’a faite esclave pour jamais ; et cependant ton fiancé, enseveli dans les délices d’une cour, attend nonchalamment que sa nouvelle épouse... ( RAZETTA )

Certains jours, travaillant aux Mystères de messieurs, j'avais envie d'alléger la planète des neuf dixièmes de ses phallophores - qui, par leur insécurité permanente, leur incertitude d'être (Pour qui tu te prends ? phrase masculine par excellence), leur passion pour les armes, leur rivalité, leur goût du pouvoir, leurs bagarres et magouilles de toutes sortes, conduisent notre espèce droit à l'extinction, d'autres jours au contraire j'avais envie de les remercier à genoux car ils ont inventé la roue et le canoë, l'alphabet et l'appareil photo, élaboré les sciences composé les musiques écrit les livres peint les tableaux bâti les palais les églises les mosquées les ponts les barrages et les routes, travaillé sans compter, durement et modestement, déployant leur force, leur patience, leur énergie et leur savoir-faire dans les champs de mine usines ateliers bibliothèques universités et laboratoires du monde entier. Oh ! hommes merveilleux, anonymes et innombrables, souffrant et vous dévouant, jour après jour, siècle après siècle pour nous faire vivre un peu mieux, avec un peu plus de confort et de beauté et de sens... que je vous aime !

When the pre-requisites of ascending life, when everything strong, plucky, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the concept of God, and step by step he has sunk down to the symbol of a staff for the weary, of a last straw for all those who are drowning; when he becomes the pauper’s God, the sinner’s God, the sick man’s God par excellence, and the attribute “Saviour,” “Redeemer,” remains over as the one essential attribute of divinity: what does such a metamorphosis, such an abasement of the godhead imply? —Undoubtedly, “the kingdom of God” has thus become larger. Formerly all he had was his people, his “chosen” people. Since then he has gone travelling over foreign lands, just as his people have done; since then he has never rested anywhere: until one day he felt at home everywhere, the Great Cosmopolitan — until he got the “greatest number,” and half the world on his side. But the God of the “greatest number,” the democrat among gods, did not become a proud heathen god notwithstanding: he remained a Jew, he remained the God of the back streets, the God of all dark corners and hovels, of all the unwholesome quarters of the world!

L'exemple de la vessie natatoire chez le poisson est excellent, en ce sens qu'il nous démontre clairement ce fait important qu'un organe primitivement construit dans un but distinct, c'est à dire pour faire flotter l'animal, peut se convertir en un organe ayant une fonction très différente, c'est à dire la respiration. La vessie natatoire fonctionne aussi, chez certains poissons, comme un accessoire de l'organe de l'ouïe. Tous les physiologiste admettent que, par sa position et sa conformation, la vessie natatoire est homologue ou idéalement semblable aux poumons des vertébrés supérieurs; on est donc parfaitement fondée à admettre que la vessie natatoire a été réellement convertie en poumon, c'est à dire en un organe exclusivement destiné à la respiration. On peut conclure de ce qui précède que tous les vertébrés pourvus de poumons descendent par génération ordinaire de quelque ancien prototype inconnu qui possédait un appareil flotteur ou, autrement dit, une vessie natatoire. Nous pouvons ainsi [...] comprendre le fait étrange que tout ce que nous buvons et que tout ce que nous mangeons doit passer devant l'orifice de la trachée, au risque de tomber dans les poumons malgré l'appareil remarquable qui permet la fermeture de la glotte.

Hegel comprehended quite correctly the abstract character of revolutionary self-consciousness of-Fichte's 'Ego = Ego' and French 'egalite'. However, the transition from the abstract to the concrete he interpreted not as a continuous revolutionary process in which the citizens become differ­entiated and class interests concretized, but on the contrary, as an advance from the turbulence of the cosmic spirit in its 'years of discipleship' to bold reconciliation with reality. Hegel's cosmic spirit goes through all the successive stages of the post-revolutionary 'transitory period' of bourgeois society — from Thermidor to constitutional monarchy. True enough, he subjects bourgeois society to sharp criticism; but not in its historically determined form — rather as the material aspect of a society par excellence. This negation is next declared to be abstract and in its transition from the abstract to the concrete is declared to be a return to material, sensuous existence, i.e. to bourgeois society­ with this difference, however, that the prosaic and sordid character of bourgeois relations here acquires a deep mys­tical significance as the embodiment of the active essence of the spirit. Such, briefly, is the meaning of the 'speculat­tive methods' of German idealist philosophy.

Consider first the mechanisms pushing toward convergence, that is, toward reduction and compression of inequalities. The main forces for convergence are the diffusion of knowledge and investment in training and skills. The law of supply and demand, as well as the mobility of capital and labor, which is a variant of that law, may always tend toward convergence as well, but the influence of this economic law is less powerful than the diffusion of knowledge and skill and is frequently ambiguous or contradictory in its implications. Knowledge and skill diffusion is the key to overall productivity growth as well as the reduction of inequality both within and between countries. We see this at present in the advances made by a number of previously poor countries, led by China. These emergent economies are now in the process of catching up with the advanced ones. By adopting the modes of production of the rich countries and acquiring skills comparable to those found elsewhere, the less developed countries have leapt forward in productivity and increased their national incomes. The technological convergence process may be abetted by open borders for trade, but it is fundamentally a process of the diffusion and sharing of knowledge—the public good par excellence—rather than a market mechanism.

I think Shakespeare would have been amazed if people had to limit him to English themes, and if they had told him as an Englishman, he had no right to compose Hamlet, whose theme is Scandinavian, or Macbeth, whose theme is Scottish. The Argentine cult of local colour is a recent European cult which the nationalists ought to reject as foreign. Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local colour; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local colour.

When everything necessary to ascending life; when all that is strong, courageous, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the concept of a god; when he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he becomes the poor man's god, the sinner's god, the invalid's god par excellence, and the attribute of "saviour" or "redeemer" remains as the one essential attribute of divinity - just what is the significance of such a metamorphosis? what does such a reduction of the godhead imply? - To be sure, the "kingdom of God" has thus grown larger. Formerly he had only his own people, his "chosen" people. But since then he has gone wandering, like his people themselves, into foreign parts; he has given up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan - until now he has the "great majority" on his side, and half the earth. But this god of the "great majority," this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the world!... His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom.... And he himself is so pale, so weak, so décadent.

Where attempts have not been made to reconcile the two moralities, they may be described as follows:— All is good in the noble morality which proceeds from strength, power, health, well-constitutedness, happiness, and awfulness; for, the motive force behind the people practising it is “the struggle for power.” The antithesis “good and bad” to this first class means the same as “noble” and “despicable.” “Bad” in the master-morality must be applied to the coward, to all acts that spring from weakness, to the man with “an eye to the main chance,” who would forsake everything in order to live. With the second, the slave-morality, the case is different. There, inasmuch as the community is an oppressed, suffering, unemancipated, and weary one, all that will be held to be good which alleviates the state of suffering. Pity, the obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, and humility—these are unquestionably the qualities we shall here find flooded with the light of approval and admiration; because they are the most useful qualities —; they make life endurable, they are of assistance in the “struggle for existence” which is the motive force behind the people practising this morality. To this class, all that is awful is bad, in fact it is the evil par excellence. Strength, health, superabundance of animal spirits and power, are regarded with hate, suspicion, and fear by the subordinate class.

Rousseau, esse primeiro homem moderno, idealista e 'canaille' numa só pessoa; que necessitava da 'dignidade' moral para aguentar seu próprio aspecto; doente de vaidade e de autodesprezo desenfreados. Esse aborto que se recostou no umbral da nova época também queria 'retorno à natureza' -- para onde, repito a pergunta, queria retornar Rousseau? -- Eu odeio Rousseau inclusive na Revolução: ela é a expressão histórico-universal dessa duplicidade de idealista e 'canaille'. A 'farce' sangrenta com que transcorreu essa Revolução, a sua 'imoralidade', pouco me importa: o que odeio é a sua moralidade rousseauniana -- as chamadas 'verdades' da Revolução, com as quais ela ainda faz efeito e convence para o seu lado tudo o que é raso e medíocre. A doutrina da igualdade!... Mas não há veneno mais venenoso: pois ela parece pregada pela própria justiça, enquanto é o fim da justiça... 'Aos iguais o que é igual, aos desiguais o que é desigual' -- esse seria o verdadeiro discurso da justiça: e, consequência disso, 'jamais igualar o que é desigual.' O fato de as coisas terem transcorrido de maneira tão medonha e sangrenta em torno dessa doutrina da igualdade conferiu a essa 'ideia moderna' par excellence uma espécie de glória e resplendor, de modo que a Revolução como espetáculo também seduziu os espíritos mais nobres. Isso não é, no fim das contas, razão para estimá-la mais. -- Vejo apenas um homem que a considerou da maneira que ela deve ser considerada, com nojo -- Goethe

Par certains aspects, les livres constituaient un lest pour rester ancrée à la vie, parce qu'ils avaient une fin. Peu lui importait qu'elle soit heureuse ou non, cela restait un privilège dont ne jouissaient pas toujours les histoires dont elle s'occupait au quotidien. Et puis, les livres étaient un excellent antidote au silence parce qu'ils remplissaient son esprit des mots nécessaires pour combler le vide laissé par les victimes. Surtout, ils représentaient une échappatoire. Sa façon de disparaître. Elle se plongeait dans la lecture et tout le reste -y compris elle-même- cessait d'exister. Dans les livres, elle pouvait être n'importe qui. Ce qui revenait à n'être personne. Quand elle rentrait chez elle, seuls les livres l'accueillaient.

The symbol of this battle, written in a script which has remained legible through all human history up to the present, is called “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome.” To this point there has been no greater event than this war, this posing of a question, this contradiction between deadly enemies. Rome felt that the Jew was like something contrary to nature itself, its monstrous polar opposite, as it were. In Rome the Jew was considered “convicted of hatred against the entire human race.” And that view was correct, to the extent that we are right to link the health and the future of the human race to the unconditional rule of aristocratic values, to Roman values. By contrast, how did the Jews feel about Rome? We can guess that from a thousand signs, but it is sufficient to treat ourselves again to the Apocalypse of John, that wildest of all written outbursts which vengeance has on its conscience ... The Romans were indeed strong and noble men, stronger and nobler than any people who had lived on earth up until then or even than any people who had ever been dreamed up. Everything they left as remains, every inscription, is delightful, provided that we can guess what is doing the writing there. By contrast, the Jews were par excellence that priestly people of ressentiment, who possessed an unparalleled genius for popular morality. Just compare people with related talents — say, the Chinese or the Germans — with the Jews, in order to understand which is ranked first and which is ranked fifth.

Ich stelle, um nicht aus meiner Art zu fallen, die jasagend ist und mit Widerspruch und Kritik nur mittelbar, nur unfreiwillig zu thun hat, sofort die drei Aufgaben hin, derentwegen man Erzieher braucht. Man hat sehen zu lernen, man hat denken zu lernen, man hat sprechen und schreiben zu lernen: das Ziel in allen Dreien ist eine vornehme Cultur. – Sehen lernen – dem Auge die Ruhe, die Geduld, das An-sich-herankommen-lassen angewöhnen; das Urtheil hinausschieben, den Einzelfall von allen Seiten umgehn und umfassen lernen. Das ist die erste Vorschulung zur Geistigkeit: auf einen Reiz nicht sofort reagiren, sondern die hemmenden, die abschließenden Instinkte in die Hand bekommen. Sehen lernen, so wie ich es verstehe, ist beinahe Das, was die unphilosophische Sprechweise den starken Willen nennt: das Wesentliche daran ist gerade, nicht »wollen«, die Entscheidung aussetzen können. Alle Ungeistigkeit, alle Gemeinheit beruht auf dem Unvermögen, einem Reize Widerstand zu leisten: – man muß reagiren, man folgt jedem Impulse. In vielen Fällen ist ein solches Müssen bereits Krankhaftigkeit, Niedergang, Symptom der Erschöpfung, – fast Alles, was die unphilosophische Roheit mit dem Namen »Laster« bezeichnet, ist bloß jenes physiologische Unvermögen, nicht zu reagiren. – Eine Nutzanwendung vom Sehen-gelernt-haben: man wird als Lernender überhaupt langsam, mißtrauisch, widerstrebend geworden sein. Man wird Fremdes, Neues jeder Art zunächst mit feindseliger Ruhe herankommen lassen, – man wird seine Hand davor zurückziehn. Das Offenstehn mit allen Thüren, das unterthänige Auf-dem-Bauch-Liegen vor jeder kleinen Thatsache, das allzeit sprungbereite Sich-Hinein-Setzen, Sich-Hinein- Stürzen in Andere und Anderes, kurz die berühmte moderne »Objektivität« ist schlechter Geschmack, ist unvornehm par excellence. –

—I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology of the priest.—The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science—the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions—a man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to “know.”... “Therefore, man must be made unhappy,”—this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.—It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world:—“sin.”... The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole “moral order of the world,” was set up against science—against the deliverance of man from priests.... Man must not look outward; he must look inward. He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must suffer.... And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.—Away with physicians! What is needed is a Saviour.—The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of “grace,” of “salvation,” of “forgiveness”—lies through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality—were devised to destroy man’s sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!—And not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!... When the natural consequences of an act are no longer “natural,” but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition—by “God,” by “spirits,” by “souls”—and reckoned as merely “moral” consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed —then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated.—I repeat that sin, man’s self-desecration par excellence, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin.

En honorant l'école à l'excès, c'est toi [l'élève excellent] que tu flattes en douce, tu te poses plus ou moins consciemment en élève idéal. Ce faisant, tu masques les innombrables paramètres qui nous font tellement inégaux dans l'acquisition du savoir : circonstances, entourage, pathologies, tempérament… Ah ! l'énigme du tempérament ! « Je dois tout à l'école de la République ! » Serait-ce que tu voudrais faire passer tes aptitudes pour des vertus ? (Les unes et les autres n'étant d'ailleurs pas incompatibles…) Réduire ta réussite à une question de volonté, de ténacité, de sacrifice, c'est ça que tu veux ? Il est vrai que tu fus un élève travailleur et persévérant, et que le mérite t'en revient, mais c'est, aussi, pour avoir joui très tôt de ton aptitude à comprendre, éprouvé dès tes premières conforntations au travail scolaire la joie immense d'avoir compris, et que l'effort portait en lui-même la promesse de cette joie ! À l'heure où je m'asseyais à ma table écrasé par la conviction de mon idiotie, tu t'installais à la tienne vibrant d'impatience, impatience de passer à autre chose aussi, car ce problème de math sur lequel je m'endormais tu l'expédiais, toi, en un tournemain. Nos devoirs, qui étaient les tremplins de ton esprit, étaient les sables mouvants où s'enlisait le mien. Ils te laissaient libre comme l'air, avec la satisfaction du devoir accompli, et moi hébété d'ignorance, maquillant un vague brouillon en copie définitive, à grand renfort de traits soigneusement tirés qui ne trompaient personne. À l'arrivée, tu étais le travailleur, j'étais le paresseux. C'était donc ça, la paresse ? Cet enlisement en soi-même ? Et le travail, qu'était-ce donc ? Comment s'y prenaient-ils, ceux qui travaillaient bien ? Où puisaient-ils cette force ? Ce fut l'énigme de mon enfance. L'effort, où je m'anéantissais, te fut d'entrée de jeu un gage d'épanouissement. Nous ignorions toi et moi qu'« il faut réussir pour comprendre », selon le mot si clair de Piaget, et que nous étions, toi comme moi, la vivante illustration de cet axiome. (p. 271-272)