And if it is grievous to be doomed one day to cease to be, perhaps it would be more grievous still to go on being always oneself, and no more than oneself, without being able to be at the same time other, without being able to be at the same time everything else, without being able to be all.
But Don Quixote was converted. Yes, and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us with his spirit, this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die.
If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.
At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: reason and right.
When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid, in which case all comment is superfluous, or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.
The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule; better still, to know how to make oneself ridiculous and not to shrink from the ridicule.
And this God, the living God, your God, our God, is in me, is in you, lives in us, and we live and move and have our being in Him. And he is in us by virtue of the hunger, the longing, which we have for Him, He is Himself creating the longing for Himself.
The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not.
Let us go on committing suicide by working among our people, and let them dream life just as the lake dreams the sky.
If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.