Pascal Bruckner Quotes

#1. 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

#2. We are not going to confine women to the home, cover their heads, lengthen their skirts, or beat up gay people, prohibit alcohol, censure film, theater, and literature, and codify tolerance in order to respect the overly sensitive whims of a few sanctimonious persons.

Pascal Bruckner

#3. 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

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

Pascal Bruckner

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

Pascal Bruckner

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Pascal Bruckner

#9. 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

#10. Frustration is a bad experience. What you have to stress is the satisfaction.

Pascal Bruckner

#11. An overblown conscience is an empty conscience.

Pascal Bruckner

#12. 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

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

Pascal Bruckner

#14. 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

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

Pascal Bruckner