Flaneur's Alley

No hope, no fear agitates me; no gossip disturbs my mind. Conversation is confined to myself and my books.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline is considered the second best French novelist after Proust (if not the best). If you felt delighted after reading Journey to the End of the Night (1932), and if you wondered what are…

the true satisfaction to be derived from food comes not from repletion but from appetite – the people who run hardest after pleasure are the least likely to catch what they are after.

“God gave to man the desire for knowledge for the sake of tormenting him.”

A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life depicts… The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life: for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest. – The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

I have watched the awakening of intelligence in each of my four children. It is so quick, so impressive, that one wonders how such a progression can end . . . in what we are.…

In a book dedicated to Samuel Beckett, Les Cahiers de l’Herne there is a short text on Beckett by another great thinker: Eugene Ionesco. Here is a part of it: … It is not from…

The title of the post is really not the luckiest. What do I mean by “literature books that inspired John Gray’s philosophy”? From the moment I started reading John Gray’s books, starting with the Straw…

If you are a fan of great spiritual confessions or autobiographies such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker or Augustine’s Confessions, a book that should delight you is Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession. It…