Pascal Bruckner famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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 mindâ€“these are all privileges that cannot be bought because they are literally priceless.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Nature #Luxury #Silence
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.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Beautiful #Sorry #Destiny
Ultimately, 'how's it going?' is the most futile and the most profound of questions. To answer it precisely, one would have to make a scrupulous inventory of one's psyche, considering each aspect in detail. No matter: we have to say 'fine' out of politeness and civility and change the subject, or else ruminate the question during our whole lives and reserve our reply for afterward.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Profound #Answers #Inventory
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.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Enchantment #Paradise #Opinion
An overblown conscience is an empty conscience.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Empty #Conscience
You're happy when you leave your concerns to the side and when you experience a pure moment of joy with friends.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Joy #Sides #Moments
You can have compassion for someone who is suffering and try to help this person but if your relationship with mankind is only one of compassion, it is only another form of contempt and it prevents feelings like admiration, empathy which to my mind are much more positive.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Compassion #Empathy #Feelings
We should distinguish between responsibility and guilt. Guilt only touches the ones who committed the crimes but the son of a criminal is not a criminal himself.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Responsibility #Son #Guilt
You don't have to give people fish everyday but instead you must give them the pole to learn how to fish themselves.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Giving #People #Everyday
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.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Daughter #Mother #Father
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.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Book #Class #Personality
Guilt is a very good thing if it is shared by others.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Guilt #Good Things #Very Good
There is no life without guilt anyway, at least in the Western world. I think in other civilizations it might be different but if the world is getting Westernized all over, guilt will enter through the technology and democracy and their actions. It will come side by side so there won't be anymore innocent societies in the future I think which in fact is not such a bad thing.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Technology #Thinking #Civilization
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.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Hands #Generations #Today
Whatever the flows of our modern times are the idea is that you can create something new out of nothing.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Ideas #Flow #Modern
You construct your happiness as you construct a house and you have to work on it. It is a daily job.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Jobs #House #Constructs
Frustration is a bad experience. What you have to stress is the satisfaction.
-- Pascal Bruckner

#Stress #Frustration #Satisfaction

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