"Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce."

"Society: an inferno of saviors!"

"The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief."

"Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself."

"Once man loses his faculty of indifference he becomes a potential murderer; once he transforms his idea into a god the consequences are incalculable. We kill only in the name of a god or of his counterfeits: the excesses provoked by the goddess Reason, by the concept of nation, class, or race are akin to those of the Inquisition or of the Reformation."

"The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue."

"His power to adore is responsible for all his crimes: a man who loves a god unduly forces other men to love his god, eager to exterminate them if they refuse."

"By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping."

"Lord, give me the capacity of never praying, spare me the insanity of all worship, let this temptation of love pass from me which would deliver me forever unto You. Let the void spread between my heart and heaven! I have no desire to people my deserts by Your presence, to tyrannize my nights by Your light, to dissolve my Siberias beneath Your sun."

"Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend."

"But where is the antidote for lucid despair, perfectly articulated, proud, and sure? All of us are miserable, but how many know it? The consciousness of misery is too serious a disease to figure in an arithmetic of agonies or in the catalogues of the Incurable. It belittles the prestige of hell, and converts the slaughterhouses of time into idyls. What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist? Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle. . ."

"Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?"

"I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity."

"Irons and the unbreathable air of this world strip us of everything, except the freedom to kill ourselves; and this freedom grants us a strength and pride to triumph over the loads which overwhelm us."

"In a single second we do away with all seconds; God himself could not do as much."

"But, braggart demons, we postpone our end: how could we renounce the display of our freedom, the show of our pride?"

"This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears."

"Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike."

"Your suffering like your fate is without motive. To suffer, truly to suffer, is to accept the invasion of ills without the excuse of causality, as a favor of demented nature, as a negative miracle..."

"What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on."

"Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it."

"Life inspires more dread than death — it is life which is the great unknown."

"Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart."

"Reality is a creation of our excesses."

"Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude."

"We die in proportion to the words we fling around us."

"Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor."

"Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory."

"Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself."

"Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows."

"By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing."

"Philosophy: impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas."

"We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void."

"Nothing proves that we are more than nothing."

"We are afraid of the enormity of the possible."

"So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined."

"The universal view melts things into a blur."

"Truths begin by a conflict with the police — and end by calling them in."

"At different degrees, everything is pathology, except for indifference."

"Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers."

"To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself."

"When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves."

"Vague a l'ame — melancholy yearning for the end of the world."

"You are forgiven everything provided you have a trade, a subtitle to your name, a seal on your nothingness."

"Try to be free: you will die of hunger."

"I find in myself as much evil as in anyone, but detesting action — mother of all vices — I am the cause of no one's suffering."

"History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility."