"Get hold of yourself, be confident once more, don't forget that it is not given to just anyone to have idolized discouragement without succumbing to it."

"How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are."

"As soon as one returns to Doubt (if it could be said that one has ever left it), undertaking anything at all seems not so much useless as extravagant. Doubt works deep within you like a disease, or even more effectively, like a faith."

"One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping."

"To found a family. I think it would have been easier for me to found an empire."

"I want to proclaim a truth that would forever exile me from among the living. I know only the conditions but not the words that would allow me to formulate it."

""Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." — This point in the Gita is my death sentence."

"To be is to be cornered."

"Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself."

"There is no one whose death I have not longed for, at one moment or another."

"Impossible to accede to truth by opinions, for each opinion is only a mad perspective of reality."

"Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?"

"Fortunate those who, born before science, were privileged to die of their first disease!"

"Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers."

"I feel effective, competent, likely to do something positive only when I lie down and abandon myself to an interrogation without object or end."

"Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day."

"Existing is plagiarism."

"What to think of other people? I ask myself this question each time I make a new acquaintance. So strange does it seem to me that we exist, and that we consent to exist."

"If instead of expanding you, putting you in a state of energetic euphoria, your ordeals depress and embitter you, you can be sure you have no spiritual vocation."

"We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering."

"To think that so many have succeeded in dying!"

"There is no false sensation."

"Erosion of our being by our infirmities: the resulting void is filled by the presence of consciousness, what am I saying? — that void is consciousness itself."

"To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement."

"Existence would be a quite impracticable enterprise if we stopped granting importance to what has none."

"My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are."

"Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again."

"God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought."

"The unfortunate thing about public misfortunes is that everyone regards himself as qualified to talk about them."

"Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser."

"Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach."

""What's wrong — what's the matter with you?" Nothing, nothing's the matter, I've merely taken a leap outside my fate, and now I don't know where to turn, what to run for..."

"The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived."

"Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."

"Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done."

"We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly."

"No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive."

"The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla."

"Say what we will, death is the best thing nature has found to please everyone. With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral..."

"I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them."

"Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations."

"The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich."

"What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself."

"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 and go nowhere, easy enough."

"The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?"

"If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?"

"In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin."

"Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?"

""Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" — That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities."

"Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that we alone pursue the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear."