A death is the most terrible of facts.
Love can’t always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.
Marriage isn’t a tram. It doesn’t have to get anywhere.
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Real worship involves waiting.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don’t expect.
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
One doesn’t have to get anywhere in a marriage. It’s not a public conveyance.
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.
The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
The very madness of the scheme protects it.