The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur. That is why there are unforgettable moments and unique people!

...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

All beginnings are involuntary.

Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness.