Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.

If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.