One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all.

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.

When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

Basically-I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs-life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything.

What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.

What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

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!

Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!

There is no false sensation.

When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.

All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.

God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.

When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.

We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.