The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

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?

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

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.