“What happens to us either happens to everyone or only to us: in the first instance it's banal; in the second it's incomprehensible.”

“what has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.”

“Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.”

“Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.”

“Once we're able to see this world as an illusion and a phantasm, then we can see everything that happens to us as a dream, as something that pretended to exist while we were sleeping. And we will become subtly and profoundly indifferent towards all of life's setbacks and calamities. Those who die turned a corner, which is why we've stopped seeing them; those who suffer pass before us like a nightmare, if we feel, or like an unpleasant daydream, if we think. And even our own suffering won't be more than this nothingness.”

“FIRST WATCHER Why do people die?SECOND WATCHER Perhaps because they don't dream enough...”

“If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”