I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

Existing is plagiarism.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation.

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

There is no false sensation.

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself.