Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone..

Everything is too far away in the past, or mysteriously too close..

I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry..

Our true birthplace is that in which we cast for the first time an intelligent eye on ourselves. My first homelands were my books..

When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other; regard th….

All happiness is a form of innocence..

Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern..

Everything that we do affects our fate for better or for worse. The circumstances into which we are born also exert a tremendous influence; we come i….

A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny..

I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, gi….

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stu….

Life is atrocious, we know. But precisely because I expect little of the human condition, man's periods of felicity, his partial progress, his effort….

A book may lie dormant for fifty years or for two thousand years in a forgotten corner of a library, only to reveal, upon being opened, the marvels o….

For my part I have sought liberty more than power, and power only because it can lead to freedom. What interested me was not a philosophy of the free….

Every life is punctuated by deaths and departures, and each one causes great suffering that it is better to endure rather than forgo the pleasure of ….

age means nothing. If anything I feel that I'm still a child: eternity and childhood are my ages..

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit..

We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief..

The mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

To stay in one place and watch the seasons come and go is tanatmount to constant travel: One is traveling with the earth..

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?.