Word – that invisible dagger.

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.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Balkans – that taste for devastation, for internal clutter, for a universe like a brothel on fire the last “primitives” in Europe.

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

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Our contortions, visible or secret, we communicate to the planet; already it trembles even as we do, it suffers the contagion of our crises and, as this grand mal spreads, it vomits us forth, cursing...

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.

Pursued by our origins… we all are.

Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

Maniacs of Procreation, bipeds with devalued faces, we have lost all appeal for each other.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.