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

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.

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

Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

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.