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

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.

I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.