We are all geniuses when we dream.
Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.
Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula. . . to give a facade tot he void.
However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.
In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.
No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.
The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.
What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.
He who hates himself is not humble.
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.