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

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

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

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