Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself.
Let it crumble! Let the rocks revile me and flowers wilt at my coming. Your whole universe is not enough to prove me wrong. You are the king of gods, king of stones and stars, king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of man.
This then is the age of reason.
Existence is an imperfection.
I am myself and I am here.
Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.
Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm.
It’s just what people do when they’re getting old, when they’re sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.
The individual’s duty is to do what he wants to do, to think whatever he likes, to be accountable to no one but himself, to challenge every idea and every person.
One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.
A human being who wakened in the morning with a queesy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bedtime, had not much use for freedom.
I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.
I found the human heart empty and insipid everywhere except in books.
Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.
There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.
He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.
The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.
I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.
I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm – because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn’t recognize it any more.
Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.