Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.

Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, in immediacy the difference in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood to what point it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when.

They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

Word - that invisible dagger.

Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other.

To suffer is to produce knowledge.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

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

We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle. variant: The fact that living is an extraordinary thing seeing things as they are, That this life is theoretically completely worthless, Seems extraordinary compared to the actual level, This means Live despite all adversities, Every moment becomes a kind of heroism

Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology. p. 70.

Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony. p. 120, first American edition

When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.

I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

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.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

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

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.

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

Pursued by our origins...we all are.

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.