However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

To hope is to contradict the future.

What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?

No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?

You have dreamed of setting the world ablaze, and you have not even managed to communicate your fire to words, to light up a single one!

Without God, everything is nothingness; and with God? Supreme nothingness.

Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.