This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

He was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way.

To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?

What gives value to travel is fear. It is a fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country, we are seized by a vague fear and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. I look upon it more as an occasion for testing.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.