Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school – its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.

It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default

A strict belief in fate is the worst of slavery, imposing upon our necks an everlasting lord and tyrant, whom we are to stand in awe of night and day.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

That which is imposing here on earth has always something of the quality of the fallen angel who is beautiful but without peace, great in his conceptions and exertions but without succes, proud and lonely.