“When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.”

I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.

Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but hypotheses may not.

In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.

I am not sure of anything, I know nothing. Can you imagine that I don’t even know the date of my own death?

You may win your heart’s desire, but in the end you’re cheated of it by death.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Every man should be capable of all ideas.

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

Everything that’s happening in the world right now makes us want to just hold on tight to the ones we love and pray that our time on this planet finds a place of peace and love for every living thing on it.

To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is there must we ever be.

You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

Everyone desires long life, not one old age.