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.

To fear is to die every minute.

From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith - of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.

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.

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.

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

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . .

Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.

So it is that after each night, facing a new day, the impossible necessity of dealing with it fills us with dread; exiled in light as if the world had just started, inventing the sun, we flee from tears-just one of which would be enough to wash us out of time.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

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.

No one has the audacity to exclaim: "I don't want to do anything!" - we are more indulgent with a murderer than with a mind emancipated from actions.

Nothing surpasses the pleasures of idleness: even if the end of the world were to come, I would not leave my bed at an ungodly hour.

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

Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Vague a l'ame - melancholy yearning for the end of the world.

You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action - mother of all vices - I am the cause of no one's suffering.

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.

Nothing is indefensible - from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime.

Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.

Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.

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.

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.

Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle...

Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

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

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

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

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

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

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.