Emile Chartier Quotes

#1. I have only one thing to say to the melancholy man: 'Look into the distance.' ... When you look at the stars or the ocean's expanse, your eye is completely relaxed; once your eye is relaxed, your mind is unfettered.

Emile Chartier

#2. To think is to say no.

Emile Chartier

#3. Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.

Emile Chartier

#4. There are only two kinds of scholars; those who love ideas and those who hate them.

Emile Chartier

#5. If religion is only human, and its form is man's form, it follows that everything in religion is true.

Emile Chartier

#6. What is a thousand years? Time is short for one who thinks, endless for one who yearns.

Emile Chartier

#7. We prove what we want to prove, and the real difficulty is to know what we want to prove.

Emile Chartier

#8. There is a future that makes itself and a future we make. The real future is composed of both.

Emile Chartier

#9. Two things are aesthetically perfect in the world - the clock and the cat.

Emile Chartier

#10. Profound sadness is always the result of an unhealthy condition of the body ... We [should] say, 'I am sad; everything looks black to me; but external events are in no way responsible. It's my body that insists on reasoning. These are the opinions of my stomach.'

Emile Chartier

#11. When we speak, in gestures or signs, we fashion a real object in the world; the gesture is seen, the words and the song are heard. The arts are simply a kind of writing, which, in one way or another, fixes words or gestures, and gives body to the invisible.

Emile Chartier

#12. It is the human condition to question one god after another, one appearance after another, or better, one apparition after another, always pursuing the truth of the imagination, which is not the same as the truth of appearance.

Emile Chartier

#13. It is not difficult to be unhappy or discontented; all you have to do is sit down, like a prince waiting to be amused ... It is impossible to be happy if one does not have the desire to be happy; one must therefore will one's happiness, and create it.

Emile Chartier

#14. One must be truthful with oneself about one's own motives, especially if one is to survive in the world. It takes rigor, and it takes courage.

Emile Chartier

#15. As opposed to the incoherent spectacle of the world, the real is what is expected, what is obtained and what is discovered by our own movement. It is what is sensed as being within our own power and always responsive to our action.

Emile Chartier

#16. People who are upset about something ruminate on it whenever they get a chance; they are constantly drawn back to their own unhappy tale as if it were a horror story left open on a table.

Emile Chartier

#17. Every idea I get I have to deny, that's my way of testing it.

Emile Chartier

#18. Wouldn't a sailor laugh at you if you told him that the whole crossing depends on the first turn of the helm?

Emile Chartier