Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things

If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.

Never believe fate is more than the condensation of childhood.

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

Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.

And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers-perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.