Quotes from Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Adults? Maybe there were only two: Thucydides and Burckhardt.

There are fewer ambitious individuals in the world today than individuals who believe they are morally obliged to be ambitious.

Democracy celebrates the cult of humanity on a pyramid of skulls.

Identifying the bourgeois class with the bourgeois mentality tricks the enemies of the bourgeoisie. The liquidation of a bourgeois class in the modern world is, in effect, nothing more than a slaughter that does not imply the abolition of a bourgeois mentality that already dominates all of society.

In order to live peacefully with one's neighbor, there is nothing better than not having a single postulate in common.

No es el origen de las religiones, o su causa, lo que requiere explicación, sino la causa y el origen de su oscurecimiento y de su olvido.

One could object to science that it easily falls into the hands of imbeciles, if religion's case were not just as serious.

The psychological mechanism of the individual "without prejudices" lacks interest.

History exhibits two types of anarchy: that which emanates from a plurality of forces and that which derives from a plurality of weaknesses.

Al despojarse de la túnica cristiana y de la toga clásica, no queda del europeo sino un bárbaro pálido

Man today does not live in space and time. But in geometry and chronometers.

Reeducating man will consist of teaching him once again to value objects correctly: that is, to need few.

Men can be divided into those who make their life complicated to gain their soul and those who waste their soul to make their life easier.

The American is not intolerable because he believes he is important individually, but because he possesses, insofar as he is an American, the solution to every problem.

It never again mattered to me where I lived after I saw the spacious, dilapidated homes pass away and the wide open, deserted fields of my infancy covered with industrial and human filth.

It is not the origin of religions, or their cause, which requires explanation, but rather the cause and origin of their eclipse and neglect.

The passivity of things deceives us: we manipulate nothing with impudence without hurting a god.

It is enough for beauty to touch our tedium for our heart to be torn like silk between the hands of life.

La violencia no basta para destruir una civilización. Cada civilización muere de la indiferencia ante los valores peculiares que la fundan.

Marxists define the bourgeoisie in economic terms in order to hide from us the fact that they belong to it.

With good humor and pessimism it is not possible to be either wrong or bored.

Whereas contemporaries read only the optimist with enthusiasm, posterity rereads the pessimist with admiration.

Istruire non è indicare soluzioni, ma rivelare problemi.

The history of art is the history of its materials, its techniques, its themes, its social conditions, its psychological motives, or its set of intellectual problems, but never the history of beauty. A value has no history.