When I happen to be busy, I never give a moment's thought to the "meaning" of anything, particularly of whatever it is I am doing. A proof that the secret of everything is in action and not abstention, that fatal cause of consciousness.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character - precisely that and nothing more.

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?

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

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...with a foolish grin.

If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

If 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.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."

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

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

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

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

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

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Word - that invisible dagger.

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.

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

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

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

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

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?

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

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

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

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

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

We are all secularised anarchists today.

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other. p. 111, first American edition