True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

Tears do not burn except in solitude.

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions-only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. ... This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.