The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.
Between the demand to be clear,and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
Society: an inferno of saviors!
The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.
To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell
I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.
Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.
To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
What are you waiting for in order to give up?
To live. . . in any sense of the word. . . is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
There was a time when time did not yet exist.
A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.
No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
The premonition of madness is complicated by the fear of lucidity in madness, the fear of the moments of return and reunion. . . one would welcome chaos if one were not afraid of lights in it.
There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.