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.

To hope is to contradict the future.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

Pursued by our origins...we all are.

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.

Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

We always love . . . despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.

Awareness of time: assault on time . . .

A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.

Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.