To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker.

Only God has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us.

Each time I have a lapse of memory, I think of the anguish which must afflict those who know they no longer remember anything. But something tells me that after a certain time a secret joy possesses them, a joy they would not agree to trade for any of their best memories

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character—precisely that and nothing but.

Impossible to read a line by Kleist without thinking that he committed suicide: as if his suicide had preceded his works. §

In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

Anything that can be done seems to me pernicious and at best futile. If need be I can rouse myself but not act. I understand all too well Wordsworth’s description of Coleridge: eternal activity without action.

The one sincere confession is the one we make indirectly—when we talk about other people.

We do not adopt a belief because it is true (they are all true), but because some obscure power impels us to do so.

“The quality of every perfect form is to release the mind immediately, whereas the corrupt form holds the mind prisoner, like a bad mirror which tells us of nothing but itself.”

Ferocity occurs in all conditions save in joy.

An existence constantly transfigured by failure.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.

If, as we grow older, we scrutinize our own past at the expense of “problems,” it is simply because we handle memories more readily than ideas.

The last whose disloyalty we forgive are those we have disappointed.

What other people do we always feel we could do better. Unfortunately we do not have the same feeling about what we ourselves do.

Detachment cannot be learned: it is inscribed in a civilization. We do not tend toward it, we discover it in ourselves.

We can meditate upon eternity only in a prone position.

History is the product of a race that stands. As a vertical animal, man was to get into the habit of looking ahead, not only in space but in time as well. To which wretched origins we may trace the Future!