What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an 'I' without shame.

On Creating — What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.