To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment.

Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive.

Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.

When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years.

Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.

Eternity is absence.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.