No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

Tolerance cannot seduce the young.

Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.