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

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.

That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

It is only in our decisions that we are important.

Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.

In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.

One always dies too soon – or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are — your life, and nothing else.

Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.

There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.

That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.

Life is a useless passion.

When the passage “All men are born free and equal,” when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?

Foster the beautiful, and every hour thou tallest new flowers to birth.

I’ve learned, That when your newly born grandchild holds your little finger in his little fist, that you’re hooked for life.

The sufferings that fate inflicts on us should be borne with patience, what enemies inflict with manly courage.

The mountain cannot frighten one who was born on it.

Imagining anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.

I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

Despair often breeds disease.