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

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.

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.

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

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.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

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?

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

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

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

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

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

We are all secularised anarchists today.

Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other.

There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony.

He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.

Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed.

Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence.

“Meeting, after several years, someone we used to know as a child, the first glance almost always suggests that some great disaster must have befallen him” Leopardi, quoted by cioran.

We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear.

Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, in immediacy the difference in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood to what point it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

To reckon on anything at all, here or elsewhere, is to afford proofs that we are still burdened with chains. The reprobate aspires to paradise; this aspiration disparages, compromises him. To be free is to rid yourself forever of the notion of reward, it is to expect nothing of men or gods, it is to renounce not only this world and all worlds but salvation itself—it is to destroy even the notion of it, that chain among chains.

It is debasing to die the way one does; it is intolerable to be exposed to an end over which we have no control, an end which lies in wait for us, overthrows us, casts us into the unnameable.

It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord — "Our Father" — had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work.

In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?

In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death.

The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts.

Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both.

A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason.

Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all.

Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone.

Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain.

Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.

Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

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.