Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

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

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?

To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally...

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

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

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

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

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their life a meaning.

The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life.

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

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

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

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

I dream of wanting - and all I want seems to me worthless.

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!

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

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

Anxiety - or the fanaticism of the worst.

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

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.

Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable.

His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse.

History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.

Society: an inferno of saviors!

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.

Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself.

As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.