But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable.

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal that cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

True knowledge comes down to vigils in the darkness: the sum of our insomnias alone distinguishes us from the animals and from our kind. What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper?

When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other.

Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it --we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.