Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

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

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

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?