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.

I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.

The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.

Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself - there is no wish I make more often.

If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.

As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.

What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.

There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

To hope is to contradict the future.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

Pursued by our origins...we all are.

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.