“Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.”

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?”

“Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds.”

“I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.”

“To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.”

“We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.”

“Our obsession with birth, by shifting us to a point before our past, robs us of our pleasure in the future, in the present, and even in the past.”