Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
The more intense a spiritual leader’s appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.
To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.
To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.
Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.
In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.
Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.
Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.
If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.
After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.
The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.
We change ideas like neckties.
All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?
To act is to anchor in the imminent future.
Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.
Everything is pathology, except for indifference.