Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.

For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.