Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.

Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

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

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?