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.

Try as I will, I don't see what might exist...

Hope is the normal form of delirium.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." - I could not, alas, find anything better.

Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god.

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.

To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.

Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better.

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

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.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other. Variant translation: We inhabit a language rather than a country.

Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream.

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...

"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?"

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.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?

We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.

Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.

Eternity is absence.

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.

It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?

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.

Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?

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.

Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing.

"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.

I long to be free - desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.

I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.

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.

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.

The real, the unique misfortune: to see the light of day. A disaster which dates back to aggressiveness, to the seed of expansion and rage within origins, to the tendency to the worst which first shook them up.

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.

Even in childhood I watched the hours flow, independent of any reference, any action, any event, the disjunction of time from what was not itself, its autonomous existence, its special status, its empire, its tyranny. I remember quite clearly that afternoon when, for the first time, confronting the empty universe, I was no more than a passage of moments reluctant to go on playing their proper parts. Time was coming unstuck from being - at my expense.

Three in the morning. I realize this second, then this one, then the next: I draw up the balance sheet for each minute. And why all this? Because I was born. It is a special type of sleeplessness that produces the indictment of birth.

Once we reject lyricism, to blacken a page becomes an ordeal: what's the use of writing in order to say exactly what we had to say?

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

Though we may prefer ourselves to the universe, we nonetheless loathe ourselves much more than we suspect. If the wise man is so rare a phenomenon, it is because he seems unshaken by the aversion which, like all beings, he must feel for himself.

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface...