I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

The reaction against your own thought in itself lends life to thought. How this reaction is born is hard to describe, because it identifies with the very rare intellectual tragedies. The tension, the degree and level of intensity of a thought proceeds from its internal antinomies, which in turn are derived from the unsolvable contradictions of a soul. Thought cannot solve the contradictions of the soul. As far as linear thinking is concerned, thoughts mirror themselves in other thoughts, instead of mirroring a destiny.