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

Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.

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

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

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.