In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

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

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.