To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.

On Creating — What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

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.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.