The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.

Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.

the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense.

Fame — the aggregate of all the misunderstandings that collect around a new name.