Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.