In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.

You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.

Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.

Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

The Creation was the first act of sabotage.

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.

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?

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world