Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.
He suddenly recalled from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves.
For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don’t look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs.
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
The more vast the amount of time we’ve left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
Seeing is limited by two borders: Strong light, which blinds, and total darkness.
He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.