"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Of all that makes us suffer, nothing — so much as disappointment — gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth."

"Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it."

"There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness."

"What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!"

"To read is to let someone else work for you — the most delicate form of exploitation."

"To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health."

"Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived."

"To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other."

"Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation."

"If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !"

"One grasps incomparably more things in boredom than by labor, effort being the mortal enemy of meditation."

"Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery."

"Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride."

"What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear."

"Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?"

"The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe."

"To have grazed every form of failure, including success."

"Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes — desertion after desertion."

"One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well."

"Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!"

"When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic."

"The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy."

"If you don't want to explode with rage, leave your memory alone, abstain from burrowing there."

"In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off."

"What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want."

"By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames."

"Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?"

"The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?"

"Without will, no conflict: no tragedy among the abulic. Yet the failure of will can be experienced more painfully than a tragic destiny."

"To think we could have spared ourselves from living all that we have lived!"

"A person who wakes up after a night of unbroken sleep has the illusion of beginning something new. When one instead remains awake the whole night long, nothing new begins."