Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

We only possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes from us.