For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.