One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.

Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy.