It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.

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...with a foolish grin.

The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

For a long time - always, in fact - I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions - only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even "realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a "solitary elephant.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...

In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

We say: he has no talent, only tone. But tone is precisely what cannot be invented - we're born with it. Tone is an inherited grace, the privilege some of us have of making our organic pulsations felt - tone is more than talent, it is its essence.

Two enemies - the same man divided.

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin, "what good did it do the occupant to be born?" I now put the same question about anyone alive.

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.