It takes any number of forms. Epigrams. Aphorisms. Fragments. Sayings. Dicta. Sententiae. Facetiae. Pearls of wisdom. Fractions of truth. Maxims. Definitions. Jottings. Miscellaneous musings. Meditations. Ricordi. Pensées. Ephemera. Miniatures. Sketches. Vignettes. Denkbilder. Capriccios. Tiny 'fires without flames' ... In returning to these genres, Matches goes back to the drawing board of modern critique. It sets out to rekindle short-form literary-philosophical reflection, with roots in the Antiquity of Heraclitus and Hippocrates, apogee in the French moralistes (La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Chamfort ...), and late splendour in German letters (Nietzsche, Kraus, Jünger ...). Moving from art and aesthetics to philosophies past and present, through natural and technological landscapes, beneath the constellations of politics, history and ethics, along the byways of contemporary literary culture--the slow reader with a little spare time will not fail to be struck. Here are pages to peruse and mistrust, texts to think with, a book to put down and ponder, to ponder and put down. A tome to keep handy, handle often, and strike repeatedly against the rough patches of the mind.

Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort remains one of the most enigmatic 'prompters' of the French Revolution. This study analyses his rhetorical and political programmes in tandem to reveal how Chamfort's discourse and politics inform and elucidate one another in both pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods. It considers his key political texts - his 'Discours à l'Académie française', Des académies, the Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française and his posthumous Maximes et pensées, caractères et anecdotes - and exposes how, in each instance, Chamfort's conception of politics hinges on the adoption and subversion of prescribed discursive forms (reception speech, historical tableau, maxim). In the 'Discours' and Des académies, Chamfort opposes the implicit discursive norm of le bon usage sanctioned by the Académie française, because it represses free expression and at the same time constitutes the Académie itself into an oppressive corporation imbued with neo-feudal values. Chamfort's subsequent interpretations of revolutionary events in his Tableaux historiques, while making explicit this same radical libertarianism, frame some reservations about the insurgent peuple as a political force. In the end, many of the tensions troubling Chamfort's politics are resolved by his posthumous Maximes et pensées, whose prevailing principle of honnêteté gives them a rhetorical and political independence from both the ancien régime, centred on notions of honneur, and the revolutionary Republic, founded on a principle of vertu. Previous studies have tended either to interpret Chamfort's works from their historical or biographical context, or - by considering exclusively the Maximes et pensées - to subordinate them to an established literary tradition. This innovative reading posits Chamfort's texts as an exemplary meeting-place of literary practice and political praxis at the time of the Revolution, shedding new light on both the function of literary forms in Chamfort's politics and the role of Chamfort the writer, as an ideological subject caught up in revolutionary events.

Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1740-1794), whom Nietzsche called the "wittiest of all moralists," is now known for little more than brillian aphorisms that captivated a long line of thinkers, from Stendhal to Cioran, Schopenhauer to Camus. Yet the fascination of Chamfort's life is barely suggested by the fragments of writing that have survived him. In Claude Arnaud's captivating biography, Chamfort the libertine, playwright, journalist, and revolutionary stands revealed as the most telling emblem of his times.

This collection gathers together the Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett's English poems (including Whoroscope, his first published verse), English translations of poems by Eluard, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and Chamfort, and poems in French, several of which are presented in translation.

Throughout his long, hectic and astonishingly varied life, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) would jot down his passing thoughts on theatre programmes, visiting cards, draft manuscripts and even bills ... Goethe was probably the last true ‘Renaissance Man’. Although employed as a Privy Councillor at the Duke of Weimar’s court, where he helped oversee major mining, road-building and irrigation projects, he also painted, directed plays, carried out research in anatomy, botany and optics – and still found time to produce masterpieces in every literary genre. His fourteen hundred Maxims and Reflections reveal some of his deepest thought on art, ethics, literature and natural science, but also his immediate reactions to books, chance encounters or his administrative work. Although variable in quality, the vast majority have a freshness and immediacy which vividly conjure up Goethe the man. They make an ideal introduction to one of the greatest of European writers.