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.

It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.

The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.

There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

The source of an emotion is very difficult to grasp, but it comes to just that. That holds for all phenomena, for faith, etc. Why did it begin, how did it develop? and so forth-only he who has the gift of divination can perceive where it really comes from. But it is not accessible to reflection.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.

To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny.

If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there.

What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

With success and a literary career one becomes an unquestioning part of the mechanism, whereas the only truly important years are those in which one is unknown.

The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!

One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

I love talking to simple people, with common folk, if you like, and I still do it and still chat now as before with anyone, regardless of intellectual level. On the contrary, I like uneducated people much better and that is obviously my Rumanian heritage.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

A person who wakes up after a night of unbroken sleep has the illusion of beginning something new. When one instead remains awake the whole night long, nothing new begins.

Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.

If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation.

One disgust, then another - to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.

Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!

"You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." - "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other. Variant translation: We inhabit a language rather than a country.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.