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.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

Life inspires more dread than death-it is life which is the great unknown.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

The more intense a spiritual leader’s appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

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.