Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

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

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.