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

Suffering gives us no special rights.

No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.

One grows out of pity when it's useless.

A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.

The act of love is a confession.

The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.