"For four or five centuries, Islam was the most brilliant civilization in the Old World. ... At its higher level the golden age of Muslim civilization was both an immense scientific success and a exceptional revival of ancient philosophy. These was not its only triumphs; literature was another: but they eclipse the rest. First, science: it was there that the Saracens ... made the most original contributions. These, in brief, were nothing less than trigonometry and algebra (with its significantly Arab name). ... Equally distinguished were Islam's mathematical geographers, its astronomical observatories and instruments ... [.] The Muslims also deserve high marks for optics, for chemistry ... and for pharmacy. More than half the remedies and healing aids used by the West came from Islam ... [.] Muslim medical skill was incontestable. ... In the field of philosophy, what took place was rediscovery - a return, essentially of the peripatetic philosophy. The scope of this rediscovery, however, was not limited to copying and handling on, valuable as that undoubtely was. It also involved continuing, elucidating and creating."

"[T]he entire course of French history since then has been influenced by something that happened in the eighteenth century” and asks “did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?"

"Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history."

"Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!"

"What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts."

"After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?"

"Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing."

""What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" — That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer."

"When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years."

"Eternity is absence."

"In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time."

"We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. — Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?"

"The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous."

"To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his."

"By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?"

"The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even of nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime..."

"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."

"We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous."

"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."

"Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man."

"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."

"One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive."

"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."