Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.

Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him or his good opinion.

The usual reproach against the essay, that it is fragmentary and random, itself assumes the givenness of totality and suggests that man is in control of this totality. The desire of the essay, though, is not to filter the eternal out of the transitory; it wants, rather, to make the transitory eternal.