Word – that invisible dagger.

You are done for – a living dead man – not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the “”mystery”” of life.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police- and end by calling them in.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

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

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

Man is unacceptable.

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.

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...