I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

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.