The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

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

Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.

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

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.