I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.

I belong to a generation - assuming that this generation includes others besides me - that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehova as I reject humanity.

What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.