What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief.
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
The universal view melts things into a blur.
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
Man is a robot with defects.
Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.
Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!
No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.
The amount of chiaroscuro an idea harbors is the only index of its profundity.