"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."

"The source of an emotion is very difficult to grasp, but it comes to just that. That holds for all phenomena, for faith, etc. Why did it begin, how did it develop? and so forth—only he who has the gift of divination can perceive where it really comes from. But it is not accessible to reflection."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"With success and a literary career one becomes an unquestioning part of the mechanism, whereas the only truly important years are those in which one is unknown."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"I love talking to simple people, with common folk, if you like, and I still do it and still chat now as before with anyone, regardless of intellectual level. On the contrary, I like uneducated people much better and that is obviously my Rumanian heritage."

"To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion."

"Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream."

"When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve."

"One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other."

"If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds."

"We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false."

"Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself."

"The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!"

"All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." — I could not, alas, find anything better."

"Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived."

"Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god."

"Hope is the normal form of delirium."

"You really should come to the house — one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." — "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"

"Try as I will, I don't see what might exist..."

"Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves."

"Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that..."

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

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

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

"To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment."

""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."

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

"It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?"