All human life is sunk deep in untruth; the individual cannot pull it out of this well without growing profoundly annoyed with his entire past, without finding his present motives (like honor) senseless, and without opposing scorn and disdain to the passions that urge one on to the future and to the happiness in it.

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent

When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life.

Every day I count wasted in which there has been no dancing.

What someone is, begins to be revealed when his talent abates, when he stops showing us what he can do.

Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will wash it up again.