Les mystiques et leurs «  œuvres  complètes ». Quand on s'adresse à Dieu, et à Dieu seul, comme ils le prétendent, on devrait se garder d'écrire. Dieu ne lit pas...

Dans les époques de stérilité, on devrait hiberner, dormir jour et nuit pour conserver ses forces, au lieu de les dépenser en mortifications et en rages.

Só é saudável em nós aquilo pelo que não somos especificamente nós mesmos: são nossas aversões que nos individualizam; nossas tristezas que nos concedem um nome; nossas perdas que nos fazem possuidores de nosso eu. Só somos nós mesmos pela soma de nossos fracassos.

It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...

My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely crystallized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh.

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.