"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them.

Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known.

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

Boredom is a larval anxiety; depression, a dreamy hatred.

Philosophy offers an antidote to melancholy. And many still believe in the depth of philosophy!

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

Awareness of time: assault on time . . .

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

Thanks to depression - that alpinism of the indolent - we scale every summit and daydream over every precipice from our bed.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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

To hope is to contradict the future.

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.

Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

The Creation was the first act of sabotage.

For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

We always love . . . despite; and that "despite" covers an infinity.

In our fear, we are victims of an aggression of the Future.

Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.

Without its assiduity to the ridiculous, would the human race have lasted more than a single generation?

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide . . .

"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"

The moment we believe we've understood everything grants us the look of a murderer.

Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?

On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."

No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.

Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to form a reality to reality's detriment.

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

A minimum of unconsciousness is necessary if one wants to stay inside history. To act is one thing; to know one is acting is another. When lucidity invests the action, insinuates itself into it, action is undone, and with it, prejudice, whose function consists, precisely, in subordinating, in enslaving consciousness to action. The man who unmasks his fictions renounces his own resources and, in a sense, himself. Consequently, he will accept other fictions which will deny him, since they will not have cropped up from his own depths. No man concerned with his equilibrium may exceed a certain degree of lucidity and analysis.