I am enraptured by Hindu philosophy, whose essential endeavor is to surmount the self; and everything I do, everything I think is only myself and the selfs humiliations.

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

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.

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

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

What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again.

Skepticism is an exercise in defascination.

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

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.

To conceive a thought - just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.

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

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.

To suffer is to produce knowledge.

When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation.

I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

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

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

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later, he will regret not having left it intact.

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

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

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

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

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

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

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

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

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

We are all secularised anarchists today.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation.

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

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?

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

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.

Word - that invisible dagger.

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.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.