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.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

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

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

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...

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.

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

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

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

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

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

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

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

Awareness of time: assault on time . . .

Erect I make a resolution; prone I revoke it.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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

To hope is to contradict the future.

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.

Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

The Creation was the first act of sabotage.