“The man too lucid to worship will also be too lucid to wreck, or will wreck only his … rebellions; for what is the use of rebelling only to discover, afterwards, a universe intact? A paltry monologue.”

“Am avut în toată viaţa mea o pretenţie extraordinară, de a fi omul cel mai lucid pe care l-am cunoscut.”

“To what temptations, to what extremities does lucidity lead! Shall we desert it now to take refuge in unconsciousness? Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet’s equal there. But our perspicacity cannot bear that such a marvel should endure, nor that inspiration should be brought within everyone’s grasp; daylight strips us of the night’s gifts. Only the madman enjoys the privilege of passing smoothly from a nocturnal to a daylight existence: no distinction between his dreams and his waking. He has renounced our reason, as the beggar has renounced our belongings. Both have found a way that leads beyond suffering and solved all our problems; hence they remain examples we cannot follow, saviors without adepts.”

“Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.”

“During the long nights in the caves, how many Hamlets must have murmured their endless monologues—for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy.”

“The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable. The great solitaries were happy in the old days, knew nothing of duplicity, had nothing to hide: they conversed only with their own solitude.”

“As the years accumulate, we form an increasingly somber image of the future. Is this only to console ourselves for being excluded from it? Yes in appearance, no in fact, for the future has always been hideous, man being able to remedy his evils only by aggravating them, so that in each epoch existence, is much more tolerable before the solution is found to the difficulties of the moment.”