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

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.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

"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.

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.