All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions-only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. ... This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

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

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.