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.

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.

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

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.

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

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

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

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

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

Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.

To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

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

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

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

When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

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

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

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

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

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

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

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

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?

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

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

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.

Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all.

Basically-I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs-life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything.

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 !

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

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

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.

Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?