Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.