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

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

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

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?

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...

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.