"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse."

"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."

"Hope is the normal form of delirium."

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

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

"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."

"Except for music, everything is a lie, even solitude, even ecstasy. Music, in fact, is the one and the other, only better."

"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 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."

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

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

"We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one — any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action."

"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."

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

"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?"

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

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

"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."

""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."

"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?"

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

"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..."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"To be is to be cornered."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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