Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man.

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.

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.

What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one.

The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so...

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.

When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions.

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.