There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.