I want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.

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Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.

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Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization.

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A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

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His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

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Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.

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I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all.

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Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

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Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

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We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

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