I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions-only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. ... This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.