The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: in truth, it is itself the quintessence of injustice.

We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.

Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

We always love . . . despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.

Awareness of time: assault on time . . .

A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

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.

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.