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As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It‘s not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination.

The trouble with creating military dictators, Locke reflected, was getting rid of them after the immediate crisis was past.

I can’t live forever. Each time something like this affair lands in my lap, I suddenly recall that I don’t want to live forever.

It had the expression common to all kittens, that of a tyrant in the becoming.

You’re ten pints of crazy in a one-pint glass.

Enlightenment! When it comes, it comes like a brick to the head, doesn’t it?

Time went by with all the speed of a sleepless night.

It was strange, how readily authority could be conjured with nothing but a bit of strutting jackassery.

There’s no freedom quite like the freedom of being constantly underestimated.

“Knowledge is power.” This is the sentence that dug the grave of philosophy in the nineteenth century. … This sentence brings to an end the tradition of a knowledge that, as its name indicates, was an erotic theory—the love of truth and the truth through love (Liebeswahrheit). … Those who utter the sentence reveal the truth. However, with the utterance they want to achieve more than truth: They want to intervene in the game of power.

Our thinking is becoming much more morose than precise. … Capacity of thought does not keep pace with what is problematic. Hence the self-abdication of critique. … Because everything has become problematic, everything is also somehow a matter of indifference.

To be “reasonable” means to put oneself into a special, rarely happy relation to the sensuous. “Be reasonable” means, practically speaking, do not trust your impulses, do not listen to your body, learn control, starting with your own sensuousness. But intellect and sensuousness are inseparable. Torless’s outbreak of sweating after two pages of the Critique of Pure Reason contains as much truth as the whole of Kantianism. The understood mutual interaction of physis and logos is philosophy, not what is spoken.