“It requires a considerable amount of unconsciousness to devote oneself unreservedly to anything. Believers, lovers, disciples perceive only one face of their deities, their idols, their masters. The worshipper remains ineluctably naive. Is there a pure feeling which fails to betray the mixture of grace and imbecility, a blissful admiration without an eclipse of the intelligence? The man who glimpses simultaneously all the aspects of a being or a thing remains forever undecided between impulse and stupor. Dissect any belief: what pomp of the heart—and how much turpitude underneath! Infinity dreamed of in the gutter retains, ineffaceable, its imprint, its stench. There is a notary in every saint, a grocer in every hero, a concierge inside the martyr. The depth of sighs conceals a grimace; sacrifices and devotions are mingled with the vapors of the earthly bordello. Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime, but a sublimity inseparable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sanctity of the orifices. … It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology, or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous. The waking state in our ravishments alters their flavor and transforms their victim into a visionary trampling ineffable pretexts. We cannot love and know at the same time, without love suffering and expiring under the mind’s gaze. Search your admirations, scrutinize the beneficiaries of your worship and the profiteers of your abandons: under their most disinterested thoughts you will discover self-love, the spur of fame, the thirst for domination and power. All thinkers are action’s eunuchs who take revenge for their failure by the intermediary of concepts. Born this side of the deed, they exalt or decry it, depending on whether they aspire to humanity’s gratitude or that other form of fame: its hatred; they unduly erect their own deficiencies, their own miseries to the rank of laws, their futility to the level of a principle. Thought is as much of a lie as love or faith. For the truths are frauds and the passions odors; and ultimately there is no choice except the one between what lies and what stinks.”
