We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.

"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...

Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.

Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation.

One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.

Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!

"You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." - "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other. Variant translation: We inhabit a language rather than a country.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.

If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.

To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.

Eternity is absence.

Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that...

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

Existing is plagiarism.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.

We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.

Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.

Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.

The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!

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.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.