One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Word - that invisible dagger.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.