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.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.

There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.