Word – that invisible dagger.

If our fellow men could be aware of our opinions about them, love, friendship, and devotion would be forever erased from the dictionaries; and if we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly...

What we crave, what we want to see in others eyes, is that servile expression, an unconcealed infatuation with our gestures.

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

Under each formula lies a corpse.

Not to be obliged, like so many others, to choose between the insipid and the atrocious.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation’s paradise and it’s tomb.

Reality is a creation of our excesses.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they...

Russia – immensity and suffocation.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don’t suffer, time flows, so that they don’t live in...

The “west” – what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles… is it with...

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

Consciousness is nature’s nightmare.

So long as man is protected by madness-he functions-and flourishes.

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

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one’s mind, or to define oneself – there is no wish I make more often .

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.

To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

We change ideas like neckties.

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

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

To be human is no solution, any more than ceasing to be so.

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask & ghost.

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

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

Jealousy – that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is...

If a man has not, by the time he is 30, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism, I don’t know if he is to be admired or scorned – a saint or...

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

Tolerance – the function of an extinguished ardor – tolerance cannot seduce the young.

My mission is to kill time, and time’s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell. Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of...

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

Life is nothing; death, everything. Yet there is nothing which is death, independent of life. It is precisely this absence of autonomous, distinct reality which makes death universal; it has no realm of its own,...

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

To live… in any sense of the word… is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.

What is pity but the vice of kindness.

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

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.