"Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it."

"I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything."

"There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself."

"To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang."

"Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been."

"This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour."

"If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!"

"Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing — between two fictions."

"How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject."

"The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell."

"It is not by genius, it is by suffering, and suffering alone, that one ceases to be a marionette."

"I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me."

"When you love someone, you hope — the more closely to be attached — that a catastrophe will strike your beloved."

"When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment."

"My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission."

"The surest means of not losing your mind on the spot: remembering that everything is unreal, and will remain so..."

"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live — moreover, the only one."

"What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!"

"What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music."

"To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked."

"For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary."

"Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better."

"Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?"

"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."

"We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to."

"There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books."

"Fear is the antidote to boredom: the remedy must be stronger than the disease."

"Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!"

"As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy."

"Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?"

"One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living."

"Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor."

"Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation."

"The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor."

"Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what..."

"Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others."

"We had nothing to say to one another, and while I was manufacturing my phrases I felt that earth was falling through space and that I was falling with it at a speed that made me dizzy."

"All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one."

"An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it."

"The farther men get from God, the farther they advance into the knowledge of religions."

"What are you waiting for in order to give up?"

"I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable."

"When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it."

"It's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late."

"It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition."

"Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil."

"I pride myself on my capacity to perceive the transitory character of everything. An odd gift which has spoiled all my joys; better: all my sensations."