Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

We are all secularised anarchists today.

The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

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.

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other. p. 111, first American edition

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.

"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?

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.