Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don't want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.

Few are made for independence, it is the privilege of the strong.

In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being.

The disappointed one speaks. I searched for great human beings; I always found only the apes of their ideals.

A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne.

Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.

The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.