Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.