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

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

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?

For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?