If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.

Self-knowledge - the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama. 

Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

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.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

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

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 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.

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

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

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

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

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

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

Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

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

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

The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

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

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

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.

We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear.

The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

We are all secularised anarchists today.

It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what - it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.