Heine said that every great tragedy was followed by a general blowing of noses. As a Jew, he saw all too clearly the universal nature of humanity.
The only thing I’ve loved is nothing at all. The only thing I’ve desired is what I couldn’t even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream.
I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit.
The basest of all human needs is the need to confide, to confess. It is the soul’s need to go outside itself.
Seeing and hearing are the only noble things that life contains. The other senses are plebeian and carnal. The only aristocracy lies in not touching. Do not get too close – that is true nobility.
All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.
Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. While feeling the wrongs and sufferings endured by Hamlet, prince of Denmark, we don’t feel our own, which are vile because they’re ours and vile because they’re vile.
Everything wearies me, even those things that don’t. My joy is as painful as my grief.
Who knows for what supreme forces – gods or demons of Truth in whose shadow we roam – I may be nothing but a shiny fly that alights in front of them for a moment or two? A facile hypothesis? Trite observation? Philosophy with no real thought? Maybe. But I didn’t think: I felt. It was carnally, directly, with profound and dark horror that I made this ludicrous comparison.
I find the slightest action impossible, as if it were some heroic deed. The mere thought of making the smallest gesture weighs on me as if it were something I was actually considering doing.
How I’d love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life’s purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else’s soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?
Twice in my adolescence – which I feel so remotely it seems like someone else’s story that I read or was told – I enjoyed the humiliating pain of being in love.
To observe oneself as one observes nature; to gaze on one’s impressions as one would on a field – that is true wisdom.
Since all stoicism is really just a harsher form of epicureanism, I want as far as possible to enjoy my misfortune.
We do not possess our sensations, and through them we cannot possess ourselves.
My life is so sad, and yet I do not even consider weeping over it; my hours are so false, and I do not even dream the gesture that might end them.
To belong to something – that’s banal. Creed, ideal, wife or profession: nothing but prison cells and shackles.
Do not make the infantile mistake of asking the meaning of things and words. Nothing has any meaning.
Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language.
In everything I am an intense, rather coarse dilettante.
Other people’s understanding of us is made up of so many complex misunderstandings.