We know that the nature of genius is to provide idiots with ideas twenty years later.

There exists a black kingdom which the eyes of man avoid because its landscape fails signally to flatter them. This darkness, which he imagines he can dispense with in describing the light, is error with...

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now...

It sometimes happens that pleasure blows anywhere it damn well chooses.

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses.

Of all possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.

Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.

Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason’s imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it...

Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night...

Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense?

As if one could do what one wanted with one’s own body!

The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later.

Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.

Love is made by two people in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd but in an oblivious crowd.

Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in...

The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind,...

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of...

Error is certainty’s constant companion. Error is the corollary of evidence. And anything said about truth may equally well be said about error: the delusion will be no greater.