To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

It is debasing to die the way one does; it is intolerable to be exposed to an end over which we have no control, an end which lies in wait for us, overthrows us, casts us into the unnameable.

My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.

What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord - "Our Father" - had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.

I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.

The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.

"Meeting, after several years, someone we used to know as a child, the first glance almost always suggests that some great disaster must have befallen him" Leopardi, quoted by cioran.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

We are all secularised anarchists today.

The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left-ignorant how to react-with a foolish grin

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear.

The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

Word - that invisible dagger.

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other. p. 111, first American edition

It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what - it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, in immediacy the difference in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood to what point it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when.

They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology. p. 70.