There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Speech is civilization itself.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.