Beautiful was this world, looking at it thus, without searching, thus simply, thus childlike.

Every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

You should not take old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don't mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.

The cup was emptied and would never be filled again.

Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.

They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.