Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.

The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

If you ever have need of my life, come and take it.

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

I am dying. I haven't drunk champagne for a long time.

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.