I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.

There's no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

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

I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.

All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.

And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.