The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

A book is a suicide postponed.