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.

"What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" - That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer.

Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.

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.

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

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

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

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.

It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one - any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.

"You really should come to the house - one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." - "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"

Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that...

Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.

All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

Hope is the normal form of delirium.

Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...

If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds.

We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false.

The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!

When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve.

To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion.

Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other. Variant translation: We inhabit a language rather than a country.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What's your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

To have committed every crime but that of being a father.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. ... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.

As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

For a long time - always, in fact - I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

I get along quite well with someone only when he is at his lowest point and has neither the desire nor the strength to restore his habitual illusions.

At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

For a long while I have lived with the notion that I was the most normal being that ever existed. This notion gave me the taste, even the passion for being unproductive: what was the use of being prized in a world inhabited by madmen, a world mired in mania and stupidity? For whom was one to bother, and to what end? It remains to be seen if I have quite freed myself from this certitude, salvation in the absolute, ruin in the immediate.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.