Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

To reckon on anything at all, here or elsewhere, is to afford proofs that we are still burdened with chains. The reprobate aspires to paradise; this aspiration disparages, compromises him. To be free is to rid yourself forever of the notion of reward, it is to expect nothing of men or gods, it is to renounce not only this world and all worlds but salvation itself-it is to destroy even the notion of it, that chain among chains.

To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.

Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

It is debasing to die the way one does; it is intolerable to be exposed to an end over which we have no control, an end which lies in wait for us, overthrows us, casts us into the unnameable.

My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.

What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord - "Our Father" - had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.

I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.

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?

To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...

Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.

In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.

You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.

Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.

Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.