“The Revolution has shown us that the advantages and opinion of society, which I thought everything, are really nothing, and always have been nothing. It is only our vanity that led us to believe otherwise...”

“it is often nothing but our own vanity that decieves us”

“Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.”

“Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.”

“I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.”

“I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that that word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves.”