"So it is that after each night, facing a new day, the impossible necessity of dealing with it fills us with dread; exiled in light as if the world had just started, inventing the sun, we flee from tears—just one of which would be enough to wash us out of time."

"Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown."

"The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are. If we had the right sense of our position in the world, if to compare were inseparable from to live, the revelation of our infinitesimal presence would crush us. But to live is to blind ourselves to our own dimensions. . . ."

"In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world"

"Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea."

"A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable."

"Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith — of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever. The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic."

"Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion."

"From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That's why life is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters."

"To fear is to die every minute."

"As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it."

"Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are."

"Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism."

"Love of the absolute engenders a predilection for self-destruction. Hence the passion for monasteries and brothels. Cells and women, in both cases. Weariness with life fares well in the shadow of whores and saintly women."

"Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved."

"All that is Life in me urges me to give up God."

"To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing"

"The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame."

"A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people."

"The more one is obsessed with God, the less one is innocent. Nobody bothered about him in paradise. The fall brought about this divine torture. It's not possible to be conscious of divinity without guilt. Thus God is rarely to be found in an innocent soul."

"There are no solutions, only cowardice masquerading as such."

"The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness."

"The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness."

"Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don't know, and we don't really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and life is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless."

"Religion comforts us for the defeat of our will to power. It adds new worlds to ours, and thus brings us hope of new conquests and new victories. We are converted to religion out of fear of suffocating within the narrow confines of this world."

"If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth."

"Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear."

"Good health is the best weapon against religion. Healthy bodies and healthy minds have never been shaken by religious fears."

"Read day and night, devour books — these sleeping pills — not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions."

"Life is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it."

"Sadness makes you God's prisoner."

"Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination."

"To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze."

"...all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint."

"As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think."

"A heart without music is like beauty without melancholy."

"Saints live in flames; wise men, next to them."

"Consciousness is nature's nightmare."

"This world was created from God's fear of solitude. In other words, us, the creatures, have no other meaning but to distract the Creator. Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we live dramas for the boredom of a spectator, whose claps have never reached the ears of a mortal."

"What am I, other than a chance in the infinite probabilities of not having been!"

"Only thoughts that are randomly born die. The other thoughts we carry with us without knowing them. They have abandoned themselves to forgetfulness so that they can be with us all the time."

"Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?"

"To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation..."

"That fear which gives birth to thoughts, and the fear of thoughts..."

"All philosophers should end their days at Pythia's feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments."

"To withstand any truth..."

"The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore."

"I don't understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday."

"Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be."