I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions - only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk.

One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.

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.

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even "realities"; you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a "solitary elephant.

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.

He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.

We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy.

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

I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

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.

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if, creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity. Yet in a less assured mood, birth seems a calamity I would be miserable not having known.

Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.

The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.

"Meeting, after several years, someone we used to know as a child, the first glance almost always suggests that some great disaster must have befallen him" Leopardi, quoted by cioran.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

We are all secularised anarchists today.

The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world.

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left-ignorant how to react-with a foolish grin

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear.

The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order.

Word - that invisible dagger.

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other. p. 111, first American edition

It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what - it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, in immediacy the difference in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood to what point it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when.

They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears.

Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology. p. 70.

Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony. p. 120, first American edition