“Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.”

You’re lucky. I’m always conscious of myself —in my mind. Painfully conscious.

A madman’s ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

It is disgusting – Why must we have bodies?

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Hell is – other people!

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

We are our choices.

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

I never could bear the idea of anyone’s expecting something from me. It always made me want to do the opposite.

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.

He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

Love has no middle term; either it destroys, or it saves.

There are two ways you can go with pain: You can let it destroy you or you can use it as fuel to drive you.

If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

I wish to raise a Black man who will not be destroyed by, nor settle for, those corruptions called power by the white fathers who mean his destruction as surely as they mean mine.

Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes angry.

If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.

Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

If you make 10,000 regulations you destroy all respect for the law.