In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.

All religions have honored the beggar. For he proves that in a matter at the same time as prosaic and holy, banal and regenerative as the giving of alms, intellect and morality, consistency and principles are miserably inadequate.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.