Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.