Pascal Bruckner Quotes

The writer has a life and a personality but the problem of today is that most of those writers have exactly the same life; they belong to the same social class, the same milieu, they have the same experiences. Once you read one of those books, you have read them all. And this is a problem.

Whatever the flows of our modern times are the idea is that you can create something new out of nothing.

The cult of happiness turns into a huge concern which to my opinion is exactly contrary to what happiness should be: a paradise of enchantment.

Love has triumphed over marriage but now it is destroying it from inside

The Western cult of happiness is indeed a strange adventure, something like a collective intoxication. In the guise of emancipation, it transforms a high ideal into its opposite. Condemned to joy, we must be happy or lose all standing in society. It is not a question of knowing whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors; our conception of the thing itself has changed, and we are probably the first society in history to make people unhappy for not being happy.

Worrying about what does not yet exist, is that a gesture of love or the worst kind of argument putting pressure on the living, an excess of scrupulous conscience? For fear of soiling our hands, we prefer to cut them off right now. [...] How far can responsibility go without turning into an abstraction? To extend it to all coming generations is to empty it of its meaning, to put a titanic weight on our shoulders. By being accountable for everything, we are accountable for nothing. We can receive no pardon for our errors, since those who would be in a position to grant it have not yet been born! A vicious circle: isn't sacrificing people today for the benefit of those to come also a way of penalizing the latter [...]?

We are not afraid of death," the suicide bombers say to show their superiority to ordinary people. But they are afraid of life, constantly trampling on it, slandering it, destroying it, and training children still in their cradles for martyrdom. Observers have noted that the photos of terrorists taken a few hours before they made their attacks show people who are serene and at peace. They have eliminated doubt: they know. It is the paradox of open societies that they seem to be disordered, unjust, threatened by crime, loneliness, and drugs because they display their indignity before the whole world, never ceasing to admit their defects, whereas other, more oppressive societies seem harmonious because the press and the opposition are muzzled.
"Where there are no visible conflicts, there is no freedom," Montesquieu said.

Become your own best friend, acquire self-esteem, think positively, dare to live in harmony, etc. - the multitude of books on the subject suggests that it isn't so easy. Happiness not only constitutes, along with the market in spirituality, the biggest industry of the age; it is also and very precisely the new moral order, and that is why depression is spreading and every rebellion against this slimy hedonism elicits unhappiness and distress. We are guilty of not being content, a problem for which we have to answer to everyone else and before our inner jurisdiction as well.

Happiness is no longer a stroke of good luck, a moment of splendor wrung from the monotony of the everyday, it is our condition, our destiny. when the desirable becomes possible, it is immediately integrated into the category of the necessary. What used to be edenic is now ordinary. Social status is no longer determined soley by wealth or power, but also by appearance: it is not enough to be rich, you also have to look good, and this produces a new kind of discrimination and invidious comparison that is no less severe. There is a whole ethic of seeming to feel good about oneself that governs us and is supported by the smiling intoxication of advertising and merchandise.

Even if I lead the most stunted, lethargic life, I still have the feeling of being caught up in an unprecedented whirlwind that has to be slowed before I can do anything else. Trying to escape the busyness that arises from the emptiness of life by resorting to still more emptiness, that is the vicious circle that threatens us. Whereas in our colorless lives we need tranquility less than authentic activities, important and meaningful events, dazzling moments that prostrate us or transport us. Time, that great thief, is constantly stealing from us; but it is one thing to be robbed magnificently and to grow old in the awareness that one has lived a full and rich life, and it is another to be cheaply gnawed away, hour by hour, for things that we have not even known. Our contemporaries' hell is called platitude. The paradise they seek is called plenitude. Some have lived; the others have simply endured.

Victims becoming torturers is such a classic historical pattern that we could formulate, regarding any revolution whatever, this iron law : combat oppression; beware of the oppressed.

You don't have to give people fish everyday but instead you must give them the pole to learn how to fish themselves.

Today, luxury resides in everything that is becoming rare: communion with nature, silence, meditation, slowness rediscovered, the pleasure of living out of step with others, studious idleness, the enjoyment of the major works of the mind - these are all privileges that cannot be bought because they are literally priceless.

Thus it takes the imminence of an infinite calamity to redeem the human adventure. On this level our age testifies to a narcissism of malediction that rips it out of its insignificance and reaffirms its centrality: by designating itself as damned, it merely emphasizes its singularity while apparently depreciating itself: 'Our period is not accidentally ephemeral; ephemerality is its essence. It cannot pass into another period but only collapse' (Anders, La Menace nucleaire, pag. 100).
What a relief to know that we are not living in a little province of time but in the historic moment when time itself is going to be engulfed! What presumption, and what naivite, to believe that we are the pinnacle of history! This self-abasement is a form of vainglory. If we can't be the best, we can still be the worst. Behind their lamentations, the catastrophists are bursting with self-importance.

You're happy when you leave your concerns to the side and when you experience a pure moment of joy with friends.

According to Auster, proximity is deceptive, and anonymity is not only the misfortune of the masses, of the cities, but also a cancer gnawing away the family and marital unit. Human contact often masks a gulf that only death or distance can bridge. We are separated from others by those very things that also connect us; we are separated from ourselves by the illusion of self-knowledge. Just as we must forget ourselves in order to reach a certain level of self-truth, we must also leave others in order to find them in the prism of memory and separation. That which is closest is often the most enigmatic, and distance, like mourning and wandering, is also an instrument of redemption.

Guilt is a very good thing if it is shared by others.

The 'destiny that eyes us from the future' makes us neglect our duties to those close to us. Third-Worldism stressed the crimes of colonialism in order to avoid speaking about the crimes of the decolonized; ecologists, wholly absorbed in their science-fiction ethics, care more about our possible misdeeds than about present injustices.

Remorse is extremely useful for a generation which has in fact dirtied its hands but for the next generation you cannot ask, for instance, young Germans today to feel guilty about Hitlerism.

By the duty to be happy, I thus refer to the ideology ... that urges us to evaluate everything in terms of pleasure and displeasure ... on the one hand, we have to make the most of our lives; on the other, we have to be sorry and punish ourselves if we don't succeed in doing so. This is a perversion of a very beautiful idea: that everyone has a right to control his own destiny and to improve his life.

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.

You construct your happiness as you construct a house and you have to work on it. It is a daily job.

Formerly irreconcilable enemies, morality and happiness have fused; today, it is being unhappy that is immoral; the superego has moved into the citadel of felicity and governs it with an iron hand. The end of culpability comes at the price of endless torment. Pleasure is no longer a promise but a problem. The idea of full satisfaction has replaced that of constraint, and it has in turn become a requirement that full satisfaction be achieved. Each of us is responsible for being in good shape, in a good mood, and no longer has to renounce anything; instead, we have to adapt to a process of improvement that rejects any resistance to change. Order has ceased to condemn us or deprive us; now it shows us, with maternal solicitude, how to fulfill ourselves.

You are not doomed to reproduce what your ancestors have done. The son will not be like his father, the daughter will not be like her mother. She can invent something new. I think that is the best message of modernity.