One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.

Everywhere resoundeth the voices of those who preach death; and the earth is full of those to whom death hath to be preached.

I devote myself to what I love the most, and for this very reason I hesitate to designate it with lofty words: I do not want to risk believing that it is a sublime compulsion, a law, which I obey: I love what I love the most too much to wish to appear to it as one compelled.

One is healthy when one can laugh at the earnestness and zeal with which one has been hypnotized by any single detail of one's life.

There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.

Every great love brings with it the cruel idea of killing the object of its love so that it may be removed once and for all from the wicked game of change: for love dreads change even more than annihilation.

Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and in all elite societies: everybody is everybody's equal.