"The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man."

"The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified."

"What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them."

"Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the cock sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches."

"It's been a long time since I've been me."

"'Any road', said Carlyle, 'even this road to Entepfuhl, will take you to the end of the world'. But the Entepfuhl road, if taken in its entirety, and to the end, goes back to Entepfuhl; so Entepfuhl, where we already were, is that very end of the world we were seeking."

"I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing."

"To be understood is to prostitute yourself."

"Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools."

"To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life."

"We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love."

"His livid face is a bewildered false green. I notice it, between the chest's hard air, with the fraternity of knowing I will also be so."

"All problems are unsolvable. The essence of the existence of a problem is that there is no solution. Looking for a fact means there is no fact. To think is not to know how to be."

"To act is to rest."

"I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success."

"The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels."

"I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have."

"There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were."

"I never meant to be but a dreamer."

"The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man."

"They bring me faith like a closed package in someone else's plate. They want me to accept it so that I don't open it."

"If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts."

"My life is as if you've hit me with it."

"My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt."

"Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it."

"My joy is as painful as my pain."

"Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly."

"I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom."

"You breathe better when you're rich."

"What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought."

"A sort of anteneurosis of what I will be when I will not longer be freezes my body and soul. A kind of remembrance of my future death makes me shudder from the inside."

"The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax."

"Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities."

"I reread? I lied! I don't dare to reread. I cannot reread. What's the point, for me, in rereading?"

"Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul."

"Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one."

"It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living."

"I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner."

"What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it."

"The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races."

"The idea of any social obligation [...] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn."

"Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy."