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!

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.

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.

To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.

Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral...