It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.

Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?

To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.

In the very corner of my soul there is an altar to a different god.

I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.

One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget.