Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

My enthusiasms...constitute my reserves, my unexploited resources, perhaps my future.

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

An existence transfigured by failure.