“I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.”

For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!

Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation.

If you do not love me I shall not be loved If I do not love you I shall not love.

All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.

Don’t wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.

All life long, the same questions, the same answers.

Go on failing. Go on. Only next time, try to fail better.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.

Don’t look for meaning in the words. Listen to the silences.

The essential doesn’t change.

Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.

But I was not made for the great light that devours, a dim lamp was all I had been given, and patience without end, to shine it on the empty shadows.

The greatest part of mankind labor under one delirium or another; and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness, but the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.

The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be.

Certain kinds of people will always have an issue with my music. But that’s fine; it’s OK. I don’t want to be the McDonald’s of music.

The bulk of mankind is as well equipped for flying as thinking.

All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.

I got what I needed instead of what I wanted and that’s just about the best kind of luck you can have.

All things considered, there are only two kinds of men in the world: those that stay at home and those that do not.