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.

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.

No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

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?

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

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?

Anxiety — or the fanaticism of the worst.