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?

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.

So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world

Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.

Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

To fear is to die every minute.

But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . .

The universal view melts things into a blur.

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?

Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.

We replace God as best we can; for every god is good, provided he perpetuates in eternity our desire for a crucial solitude. . . .

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.