Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

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

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

Awareness of time: assault on time . . .

Sooner or later, each desire must encounter its lassitude: its truth . . .

Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.

If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

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

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

However intimate we may be with the operations of the mind, we cannot think more than two or three minutes a day; - unless, by taste or by profession, we practice, for hours on end, brutalizing words in order to extract ideas from them. The intellectual represents the major disgrace, the culminating failure of Homo sapiens.

To hope is to contradict the future.

What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?

No longer ask me for my program: isn't breathing one?

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!

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

Of all calumnies the worst is the one which attacks our indolence, which contests its authenticity.

The skepticism which fails to contribute to the ruin of our health is merely an intellectual exercise.

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

We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

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

I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide.

As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

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

"I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection.

Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.

There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition.

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.

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

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

In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.

Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?

Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves - that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it.

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...

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

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

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

The wrinkles of a nation are as visible as those of an individual.

A gifted humanity can only produce skeptics, never saints.

Pursued by our origins...we all are.

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don't know if he is to be admired or scorned - a saint or a corpse.

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

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

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?