“Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.”

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.

You are quite unnecessary, young man!

I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

In war it is necessary to kill as many people as possible — such is the cynical logic of war. Brutality in a fight is unavoidable; have you seen how cruelly children fight in the streets?

The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappiness does not unite people, but separates them.

We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.

When I cannot understand my Father’s leading, And it seems to be but hard and cruel fate, Still I hear that gentle whisper ever pleading, God is working, God is faithful-Only wait.

I believe we all deserve good endings. We were kind people before this world turned us cruel.

The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.