Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

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

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

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.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.