If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

On Creating — What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.