As far back as I can remember, I’ve utterly destroyed within myself the pride of being human. And I saunter to the periphery of the Race like a timorous monster, lacking the energy to claim kinship with some other band of apes.
The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.
Mystery – a word we use to deceive others, to convince them we are “deeper” than they are.
A little more fervor in my nihilism and I might – gainsaying everything – shake off my doubts and triumph over them. But I have only the taste of negation, not its grace.
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out... in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.
If there is so much discomfort and ambiguity in lucidity, it is because lucidity is the result of the poor use to which we have put our sleepless nights.
This is how we recognize the man who has tendencies toward an inner quest: he will set failure above any success, he will even seek it out, unconsciously of course. This is because failure, always essential, reveals us to ourselves, permits us to see ourselves as God sees us, whereas success distances us from what is most inward in ourselves and indeed in everything.
In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left – ignorant how to react – with a foolish grin.
A philosopher is saved from mediocrity only by skepticism or mystique, these two forms of despair in the front of knowledge. Mystique is an escape from knowledge, and skepticism is knowledge without hope. In both kinds world is not a solution.
Everything that can be classified is perishable. Only what is susceptible to several interpretations endures.
That faint light in each of us which dates back to before our birth, to before all births, is what must be protected if we want to rejoin that remote glory from which we shall never know why we are separated.