The salutary or awkward consequences of what he thinks matter little to the man who questions himself at hours when others are the prey of sleep. Hence he meditates upon the bad luck of being born without concern for the harm he can cause others or himself.

First of all, lucidity is the only vice which makes us free. Free in a desert.

Never quit the possible. Wallow in eternal trifling. Forget to be born.

The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

For a long time, always in fact, I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed, and that I wasn't able to deal with it. For this reason, and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

Whenever I flag and feel sorry for my brain, I am carried away by an irresistible desire to proclaim.

That is the moment I realize the paltry depths out of which rise reformers, prophets, and saviors.

Our thoughts, in the pay of our panic, are oriented toward the future, follow the trail of all fear, open out onto death, and we invert their course. We send them backward when we direct them toward birth, and force them to linger upon it.
EC