In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our v….

The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role..

Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when….

I am spoken to not in words, which come to me quaint and veiled, but in signs, in conformations of face and hands, in postures of shoulders and feet,….

And anyway, I suspect he secretly liked it when a woman was cold and distant.

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange..

There seemed nothing to do but live..

His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me; it passes t….

We are not by nature cruel..

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.

(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution..

Should philosophers be expected to change the world? Such an expectation seems to me extravagant. Marx himself didn't change the world: he reinterpre….

Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the b….

That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then….

To the last we have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable. No one truly believes, despite the….

When all else fails, philosophize..

Because a women's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it..

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable..

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing..

If you were blind you would hardly have fallen in love in the first place. But now, do you truly wish to see the beloved in the cold clarity of the v….

The highest type of intelligence, says Aristotle, manifests itself in an ability to see connections where no one has seen them before, that is, to th….