For the normal man, life is an undisputed reality; only the sick man is delighted by life and praises it so that he won’t collapse.

the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.

I try–without success–to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the...

The contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself,...

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and...

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

Only the mediocre want to die of old age. Suffer, then, drink pleasure to its last dregs, cry or laugh, scream in despair or with joy, sing about death or love, for nothing will endure!...

Le Requiem de Mozart. Un souffle de l’au-delà y plane. Comment croire, après une pareille audition, que l’univers n’ait aucun sens? Il faut qu’il en ait un. Que tant de sublime se résolve dans le...

istoriei ne arată însă clar ce a luat el în serios…

The sense that everything is going wrong has existed in every era, and rightly so since men have found no greater pleasure than in inventing new ways to make each other miserable.

Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself...

Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the...

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...

Né avec une me habituelle, j’en ai demandé une autre à la musique : ce fut le début de malheurs inespérés.

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.