My past is everything I failed to be.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

المرآة تعكس بدقة متناهية دون أن تخطئ ابداَ . لأنها وبكل بساطة لا تفكر

Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.

I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had any friends, either because they never appeared, or because the friendship I had imagined was a mistake made by my dreams. I always lived an isolated life, which became more and more isolated the more I came to know myself.

Sitting at the tables of cafés in the cities I visited, I found myself thinking that everything tasted to me of dreams, of emptiness. I sometimes found myself wondering if I was still sitting at the table of out old house, motionless and dazzled by dreams! I cannot promise you that this is not what is happening, that I am not still there now, that all this, including this conversation with you, is false and imaginary. Who are you, by the way? The absurd thing is that you don’t know either...

I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.

Our problem isn't that we're individualists. It's that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven't done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.