Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them.

Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral...

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.

"What's wrong — what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for...

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them.

God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.

Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none.

To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.

Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself.

There is no false sensation.

To think that so many have succeeded in dying!

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation.

What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist.

Existing is plagiarism.

A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!

Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?

Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality.

There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another.

Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.

To be is to be cornered.

"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." — This point in the Gita is my death sentence.

I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it.

To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith.

How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.

Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it.

The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his.

The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous.

We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous.

We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. — Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

Eternity is absence.