“To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.”

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

I make the other’s absence responsible for my worldliness.

This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.

Frontiers are physical as well as symbolic constructions.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it’s been pretty fun.

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language – the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.

Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought?

That which you know, know not; and that which you see, see not.

Know thyself as the pride of His creation, the link uniting divinity and matter; behold a part of God Himself within thee; remember thine own dignity nor dare descend to evil or meanness.

In many things it is not well to say, “Know thyself”; it is better to say, “Know others.”

He was trying to fit this Herakles onto the one he knew.

I own with reason: for, if men but knew Some fixed end to ills, they would be strong By some device unconquered to withstand Religions and the menacings of seers.

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots – suspicion.

If you did not know at age five that the gods are made up beings and the myths made up stories, you are a fool.

As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not; so men are proved, by their speeches, whether they be wise or foolish.