A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.

Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures. ... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies. ... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable.

For now it seems that by advancing into unknown territories, I entered into my life

I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

The way I see it, there is no greater spiritual beauty than fanaticism, of a sort so sincere it can only end in martyrdom.

The savage hatred I feel for crowds is getting worse, natural enemies that they are of imagination and of thought.

I feel alone, free, and detached from everything in the world, and I'm happy.