Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

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

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.