One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.

Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation.

If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !