The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.

To have grazed every form of failure, including success.

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.

One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

Existing is plagiarism.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation.

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!

Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.

As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.

I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.

"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.

To be is to be cornered.

Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.

To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

There is no false sensation.

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral...

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass - which is better than trying to fill them.

Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

"What's wrong - what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? - that void is consciousness itself.

To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.

God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

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

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.