How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.