"We are always more disposed to laugh at nonsense than at genuine wit; because the nonsense is more agreeable to us, being more comformable to our own natures: fools love folly, and wise men wisdom."

"There is in us more of the appearance of sense and of virtue than of the reality."

"Blessed, unquestionably, is he who has it in his power to do evil, yet does it not."

"When one has one good day in the year, one is not wholly unfortunate."

"Though jealousy be produced by love as ashes are by fire, yet jealousy extinguishes love, as ashes smother the flame."

"I never knew a mocker who was not mocked, ... a deceiver who was not deceived, or a proud man who was not humbled."

"Mariage est un état de si longue durée, qu'il ne doit être commencé légèrement, ne sans l'opinion de nos meilleurs amis et parents."

"There is no greater fool than he who thinks himself wise; no one wiser than he who suspects he is a fool."

"The virtuous action, done for virtue's sake alone, is truly laudable."

"No one perfectly loves God who does not perfectly love some of his creatures."

"He who knows his own incapacity, knows something, after all."

"Man is wise ... when he recognises no greater enemy than himself."

"God always helps madmen, lovers, and drunkards."

"No one ever perfectly loved God who did not perfectly love some of his creatures in this world."

"Un malheureux cherche l'autre."

"Love works miracles every day: such as weakening the strong, and strengthening the weak; making fools of the wise, and wise men of fools; favoring the passions, destroying reason, and, in a word, turning everything topsy-turvy."

"Men are so accustomed to lie, that one can not take too many precautions before trusting them — if they are to be trusted at all."

"The woman who does not choose to love should cut the matter short at once, by holding out no hopes to her suitor."

"He who knows his incapacity, knows something."

"I have heard much of these languishing lovers, but I never yet saw one of them die for love."

"To me it seems much better to love a woman as a woman, than to make her one's idol, as many do. For my part, I am convinced that it is better to use than to abuse."

"Extreme concupiscence may be found under an extreme austerity."

"Lesbians are not women."

"Le malheur de l'égalité, c'est que nous ne la voulons qu'avec nos supérieurs."

"If the fornicators sin, those who impregnate sin a hundred times more."

"The fact that we suffer doesn't necessarily imply that pain is meaningful; quite the contrary! It's always pointless to endure pain, but our vanity refuses to admit it, and therefore builds castles in the air to amuse itself with illusions, which is also called metaphysics."

"Pessimism has never been in fashion because no order could stand it; it's a luxury of the mind, and thus beyond the reach of the common man."

"Every child believes in its parents: that seems to be the first mistake, for they are usually not gods but ordinary people, and a child will never reach manhood unless it sees through this deception. The free man must be unfaithful to his roots; otherwise, he becomes a servant."

"My entire existence is a methodical "NO”."

"I would be pleased indeed, if the universe were full of blazing ovens, concentration camps, and people deported."

"Life is no longer sacred from the moment the living become too numerous. The lives of surplus men are no more valuable than those of insects, and soldiers killed in war are no different in the eyes of those who command them."

"Evil desires men to multiply, for the more men there are, the less they are worth. To be truly human, man will never be rare enough."

"Since order is not infallible, it is up to war to one day remedy its faults, and as order continues to multiply them, we are heading towards war; war and the future seem inseparable. This is the only certainty: death is, in a word, the meaning of everything, and man is but a thing in the face of death, as are nations. History is a passion, and its victims are legion. The world we live in is hell moderated by nothingness, where man, refusing to know himself, prefers to sacrifice himself like an animal species that has become too numerous - similar to swarms of locusts and armies of rats - believing that it is more sublime to perish, to perish innumerable times, than to finally reconsider the world he inhabits."

"The cities we inhabit are schools of death because they are inhuman. Each has become a den of noise and stench. Each has become a chaos of buildings where we amass ourselves by the millions, losing our life's purpose. Unfortunates, with no escape, we feel that we have put ourselves, willingly or not, in the labyrinth of the absurd, from which we will only emerge dead, for our destiny is to multiply without end, only to perish in great numbers. With each turn of the wheel, the cities we inhabit advance imperceptibly towards each other, aspiring to merge into an absolute chaos of noise and stench. With each turn of the wheel, the price of land rises, and in the labyrinth that devours free space, the revenue from investments builds hundreds of walls, day after day. Since money must work and the cities we inhabit must progress, it's still legitimate for their houses to double in height with each generation, even if they lack water every two days. The builders only seek to escape the fate they are preparing for us by fleeing to the countryside."

"We live for death, love for death, and give birth and toil for death. Our works and days now follow one another in the shadow of death. The discipline we adhere to, the values we uphold, and the plans we make all lead to one end: death."

"We, who are not satisfied with empty words, consent to disappear, and we rejoice in our fate. We didn't choose to be born, and consider ourselves fortunate to have nowhere to outlive this life, which was imposed upon us rather than given — a life full of sorrows and pains with dubious or harmful pleasures."

"Great heed has to be taken about the fact that most of us desire to remain unconscious: felicity (in eyes of common man) is rapture and rapture seems a quenching of awareness reduced to the awareness of its obliteration... Sex and Religion are centred on it both and I dare say that their convenience will in future be to join instead of rivalling, as they are wont to do, obscenity will be religious as it was long ago."

"In every saint there lurks an arrant knave, the marrow of all holiness being absolute hellishness. That's why our Saviors are of no avail, their remedies being too strong for the common man, who is the puppet of his fleshly appetite and not a sinner."

"Our moral ideas are not transcendent, our moral ideas are historical and History obeys to changing Aions, we feel that ours is fading and no authority can enforce confidence rooted in what no power includes : in Sensibility itself. To every Aion a new Sensibility adheres and to each Sensibility another Aion is related, sin is nowhere, we only see abuse and worst among abuses, the delusion of sin as such."

"The older I grow, the more Gnosis speaks to my reason: the world is not ruled by a Providence, it's intrinsically evil and deeply absurd, and Creation is either the dream of blind intelligence or the game of a principle without a moral."

"Happiness rarely leads us to intellectual adventures. Writers and artists, not to mention philosophers, are usually dissatisfied with themselves or the world."

"The few truths contained in the so-called Catholic faith lead us back to Gnosticism, which is a precise description of universal misery and absurdity, literally doubling its weight with death. In the light of Gnosis, we rediscover in Existentialism the abandonment and confinement of man: he is left alone, chained, and walks among the crowd under the closed vault of destiny, prey to loneliness and finitude. He discovers that he did not choose the suffering he has to endure, that he was just there, nothing else, and that he cannot transcend this situation since it is part of his essence."

"Most of us live betwixt quiet despair and furious nihilism."

"The educated reader knows, as he reads me, that he is listening to a fugue in four voices."

"I don't hide my profession of pessimism and I'm an avowed partisan of reaction."

"I was born to myself between 1946 and 1948, I then opened my eyes on the world, until that moment I have been blind."

"According to Gnosis, the universe is the prison of the species and is virtually embraced by fate, which is reminiscent of Sartre despite all the differences in expression. We enter the world through a gate that requires no explanation: we are the outcasts of women. We emerge from the womb and are thrust into something we didn't choose, which is essentially Heidegger's concept of thrownness. Our mothers cast us into the world, and we awaken as prisoners. When our eyes open, we find ourselves in chains. Our existence is like Plato's cave, where we perceive only the shadows of things."

"It's because life itself is inhuman that men are not human."

"French, German, English and Spanish are four admirable languages and I manage to express myself in all of them with more or less skill."