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?