“Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.”

“The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender.”

“Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic”

“Meditate but one hour upon the self’s nonexistence and you will feel yourself to be another man,” said a priest of the Japanese Kusha sect to a Western visitor. Without having frequented the Buddhist monasteries, how many times have I not lingered over the world’s unreality, and hence my own? I have not become another man for that, no, but there certainly has remained with me the feeling that my identity is entirely illusory, and that by losing it I have lost nothing, except something, except everything.”

“It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...”

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one.”

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all”