Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.

The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else--we are the busiest people in the world.

A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

With some people solitariness is an escape not from others but from themselves. For they see in the eyes of others only a reflection of themselves.

The wisdom of others remains dull till it is writ over with our own blood. We are essentially apart from the world; it bursts into our consciousness only when it sinks its teeth and nails into us.

Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.