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.

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach...

I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations. I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since...

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one...

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade tot he void.

I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing...

The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of...

Glory – once achieved, what is it worth?

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

Wherever we go, we come up against the human, a repulsive ubiquity before which we fall into stupor and revolt, a perplexity on fire.

Basis of society: anonymous sweat.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

You are alive only when you live by the skin of your teeth.

Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil. It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it,...

To be modern is to tinker with the incurable.

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.