Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

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

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