This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degradation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out; that you will never become a different man.

I swear to you, sirs, that excessive consciousness is a disease--a genuine, absolute disease.

They have this social justification for every nasty thing they do!

If there is no God, then I am God.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach.

I have been tortured with longing to believe ... and the yearning grows stronger the more cogent the intellectual difficulties stand in the way.