Quotes from Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Todo necesita justificar su existencia, salvo la obra de arte.

A cultivated soul is one where the din of the living does not drown out the music of the dead.

God ends up being a parasite in souls where ethics predominates. The religious life begins when we discover that God is not a postulate of ethics, but the only adventure in which it is worth the trouble to risk ourselves.

An aristocratic society is one where the desire for personal perfection is the animating spirit of the social institutions.

Even the enemy of technology denounces its public, but trivial, outrages more than its invisible, but disastrous, destructions. (As if contemporary man's feverish migration, for instance, were disturbing because of traffic accidents.)

Das Individuum, das eine authentische Berufung hat, ist reaktionär, welcher Art die Überzeugungen auch seien, die es hegt. Demokrat ist, wer erwartet, daß die Außenwelt ihm Ziele setzt.

Whoever appeals to any science in order to justify his basic convictions inspires distrust of his honesty or his intelligence.

The fool is scandalized and laughs when he notices that philosophers contradict each other. It is difficult to make the fool understand that philosophy is precisely that: the art of contradicting each other without canceling each other out.

Las matemáticas son la poesía del principio de identidad.

The leftist, like the polemicist of yesteryear, believes he refutes an opinion by accusing the holder of that opinion of immorality.

Knowing solves only subordinate problems, but learning protects against tedium. Only the contemplation of the immediate saves us from tedium in this incomprehensible universe.

Only those who secretly propagate the admiration of beauty conspire effectively against today's world

Whoever is curious about how to measure his stupidity should count the number of things that seem obvious to him.

When nothing in society deserves respect, we should fashion for ourselves in solitude new silent loyalties

That Christianity may not solve social problems is no reason to commit apostasy except for those who forget that it never promised to solve them.

The defeated reactionary always retains the option of entertaining himself with the victor's simplistic ideas.

The intellectual irritates the civilized man, just as the adolescent irritates the adult, not because of the audacity of his bright ideas but because of the triviality of his arrogance.

Idéologie de l'homme moderne: acheter le plus d'objets possibles; réaliser le plus de voyages possibles; copuler le plus grand nombre de fois possible.

The incorrigible political error of the man of good will is to presuppose naively that at every moment it is possible to do what must be done. Here, where what is necessary is often impossible.

Order is a deception. But disorder is not a solution.

Being reactionary is understanding that it is not possible to demonstrate or convince, only to invite.

Wird einem Demokraten ein Finger brandig, fällt ihm nur eines ein: Ein Gesetz zu fordern, das das Abschneiden aller Hände anordnet.

Ni cristianismo ni paganismo, enseñan éticas altruistas. Tanto la moral cristiana, como la moral pagana, son individualismos éticos, que imponen deberes sociales, tan solo como medios de nuestra perfección terrestre o de nuestra salvación enigmática.

I am the asylum of all the ideas displaced by modern ignominy.