The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that ‘black hole’ is infinity itself; their dreams loom and vanish against a background of immutable ebony. No crying out, no convulsions—nothing but the fixity of the pensive gaze.

With the gods gone, and Christ not yet come, there was a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone. Nowhere else do I find that particular grandeur.

The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.