No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

To hope is to contradict the future.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.

Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.