Pascal Mercier Quotes & Sayings

Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become. — Pascal Mercier

In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom. — Pascal Mercier

Of the thousand experiences we have, we find language for one at most and even this one merely by chance and without the care it deserves. — Pascal Mercier

I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it. — Pascal Mercier

Disappointment is considered bad. A thoughtless prejudice. How, if not through disappointment, should we discover what we have expected and hoped for? And where, if not in this discovery, should self-knowledge lie? So how could one gain clarity about oneself without disappointment?
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One could have the hope that he would become more real by reducing expectations, shrink to a hard, reliable core and thus be immune to the pain of disappointment. But how would it be to lead a life that banished every long, bold expectation, a life where there were only banal expectations like "the bus is coming"? — Pascal Mercier

Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave! — Pascal Mercier

When dictatorship becomes a fact, revolution becomes a right! — Pascal Mercier

Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else. — Pascal Mercier

Should we be grateful for the protection that guards us from the strangeness of one another? And for the freedom it makes possible? How would it be if we confronted each other unprotected by the double refraction represented by the interpreted body? If, because nothing separating and adulterating stood between us, we tumbled into each other? — Pascal Mercier

What separates me from my present is like a fine mist, an intangible veil, an invisible wall. They don't put up the slightest resistance. Nothing would shatter if I were to walk through it. Because there is actually nothing at all between me and the world. A single step would be enough. Why didn't I take it long ago? — Pascal Mercier

Sleepless people were bound by a wordless solidarity. — Pascal Mercier

That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic? — Pascal Mercier

Getting on an airplane and arriving a few hours later in a completely different world with no time to take in individual images of the road - he didn't like that and it bothered him. — Pascal Mercier

One who would really like to know himself would have to be a restless, fanatical collector of disappointments, and seeking disappointing experiences must be like an addiction, the all-determining addiction of his life, for it would stand so clearly before his eyes that disappointment is not a hot, destroying poison, but rather a cool calming balm that opens our eyes to the real contours of ourselves. — Pascal Mercier

Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations? — Pascal Mercier

Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language out of me so that I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the banalities of the same talk. — Pascal Mercier

Loyalty ... A will, a decision, a resolution of the soul. — Pascal Mercier

It is not the pain and the wounds that are the worst. The worst is the humiliation. — Pascal Mercier

To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation? — Pascal Mercier

After a while, he understood that he was experiencing a great liberation; the liberation from his self-imposed limitation, from a slowness and heaviness expressed in his name and had been expressed in the slow measured steps of his father walking ponderously from one room of the museum to another; liberation from an image of himself in which, even when he wasn't reading, he was someone bending myopically over dusty books; an image he hadn't drawn systematically, but that had grown slowly and imperceptibly; the image of Mundus, which bore not only his own handwriting, but also the handwriting of many others who had found it pleasant and convenient to be able to hold on to this silent museum-like figure and rest in it. — Pascal Mercier

AS SOMBRAS DA ALMA. THE SHADOWS OF THE SOUL. The stories others tell about you and the stories you tell about yourself: which come closer to the truth? Is it so clear that they are your own? Is one an authority on oneself? But that isn't the question that concerns me. The real question is: In such stories, is there really a difference between true and false? In stories about the outside, surely. But when we set out to understand someone on the inside? Is that a trip that ever comes to an end? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories? — Pascal Mercier

Each of us is several, is man, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. — Pascal Mercier

Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living. — Pascal Mercier

Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years. — Pascal Mercier

Don't waste your time, do something worthwhile with it.
But what can that mean: worthwhile? Finally to start realizing long-cherished wishes. To attack the error that there will always be time for it later ... Take the long-dreamed-of trip, learn this language, read those books, buy yourself this jewelry, spend a night in that famous hotel. Don't miss out on yourself.
Bigger things are also part of that: to give up the loathed profession, break out of a hated milieu. Do what contributes to making you more genuine, moves you closer to yourself. — Pascal Mercier

We live here and now. Everything before and in other places is past. Mostly forgotten. What could, what should be done with all the time that lies ahead of us, open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty? Is it a wish? Dream-like and nostalgic, to stand once again at that point in life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made us who we are? — Pascal Mercier

Human beings can't bear silence. It would mean that they would bear themselves. — Pascal Mercier

What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? — Pascal Mercier

There were the people who read and there were the others. Whether you were a reader or a nonreader
it was quickly noted. There was no greater distinction between people. — Pascal Mercier

For that is the meaning of a farewell in the full, important sense of the word: that the two people, because they part, come to an understanding of how they have seen and experienced each other. What succeeded between them and what failed. That takes fearlessness: you have to be able to endure the pain of dissonance. It is also about acknowledging what was impossible. Parting is also something you do with yourself: to stand by yourself under the look of the other. The cowardice of a farewell resides in the transfiguration: in the attempt to bathe what was in a golden light and deny the dark. What you forfeit in that is nothing less than the acknowledgement of your self in those features produced by darkness. — Pascal Mercier

Think that you have to die someday, maybe this morning."
"I think of it all the time, and so I play hooky from the office and let myself bask in the sun. — Pascal Mercier

To stand by yourself
that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself. — Pascal Mercier

It wasn't only that you didn't see him anymore, meet him anymore. You saw his absence and encountered it as something tangible. His not being there was like the sharply outlined emptiness of a photo with a figure cut out precisely with scissors and now the missing figure is more important, more dominant than all others. — Pascal Mercier

SOLIDAO, LONELINESS.
What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? ... it isn't only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth? — Pascal Mercier

You and I are both admirers of Marcus Aurelius, and you will remember this passage in his Meditations: "Do wrong to thyself, do wrong to thyself, my soul; but later thou wilt no longer have the opportunity of respecting and honoring thyself. For every man has but one life. But yours is nearly finished, though in it you had no regard for yourself but placed thy felicity in the souls of others. . . . But those who do not observe the impulses of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy." Thank — Pascal Mercier

To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means. — Pascal Mercier

You can never have for yourself someone who isn't on good terms with himself. — Pascal Mercier

What did I know of your fantasies? Why do we know so little about the fantasies of our parents? What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination? — Pascal Mercier

[Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity. — Pascal Mercier

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. — Pascal Mercier

Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it enigmatic and it had never stopped impressing him. How did words do that? Wasn't it like magic?But at this moment, the mystery seemed greater than usual, for these were words he hadn't even known yesterday morning. — Pascal Mercier

The dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now ... To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap - it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself - the only marked by events - along on this journey. — Pascal Mercier

NOBREZA SILENCIOSA. SILENT NOBILITY. It is a mistake to believe that the crucial moments of a life when its habitual direction changes forever must be loud and shrill dramatics, washed away by fierce internal surges. This is a kitschy fairy tale started by boozing journalists, flashbulb-seeking filmmakers and authors whose minds look like tabloids. In truth, the dramatics of a life-determining experience are often unbelievably soft. It has so little akin to the bang, the flash, of the volcanic eruption that, at the moment it is made, the experience is often not even noticed. When it deploys its revolutionary effect and plunges a life into a brand-new light giving it a brand-new melody, it does that silently and in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility. — Pascal Mercier

Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us
what happens with the rest? — Pascal Mercier

I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal notes. I need it against the shrill farce of marches. — Pascal Mercier

Boundless openness is simply not possible. It is beyond our power. The loneliness of having to conceal, it also exists. — Pascal Mercier

Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace. — Pascal Mercier

So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be. — Pascal Mercier

I love tunnels. They 're the symbol of hope: sometime it will be bright again.
If by chance it is not night. — Pascal Mercier

He had walked on the beach and wished for icy winds to sweep away everything that sounded like mere linguistic habit, a malicious kind of habit that prevented thinking by producing the illusion that it had already taken place and found its conclusion in the hollow words. — Pascal Mercier

How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be a last sentence. — Pascal Mercier

We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose color and shape change as in a kaleidoscope that is constantly shaken. — Pascal Mercier

As long as the case lay on the desk, the students would assume he was coming back. But that wasn't why he had left the books or why he now resisted the temptation to get them. If he left now, he also had to go away from those books. He felt that very clearly, even if at this moment, on the way out, he had no idea what it really meant: to go away. In — Pascal Mercier

A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long. — Pascal Mercier

I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the luminosity of the words and the violent verbal subjugation by a complacent God. The hatred is a difficult hatred for how can you allow yourself to hate words that are part of the melody of life in this part of the world? Words that taught us early on what reverence is? — Pascal Mercier

When you have discovered disappointment as the guide to yourself, you will be eager to learn how much you are disappointed about yourself: about — Pascal Mercier