"Whether or not there exists a solution to problems troubles only a minority; that the emotions have no outcome, lead to nothing, vanish into themselves — that is the great unconscious drama, the affective insolubility everyone suffers without even thinking about it."

"Not content with real sufferings, the anxious man imposes imaginary ones on himself; he is a being for whom unreality exists, must exist; otherwise where would he obtain the ration of torment his nature demands?"

"In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety."

"Objection to scientific knowledge: this world doesn't deserve to be known."

"The advantage of meditating upon life and death is being able to say anything at all about them."

"Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities."

"Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity."

"There is an innate anxiety which supplants in us both knowledge and intuition."

"Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life."

""I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside." This remark of a mental patient weighs more heavily than a whole stack of works on introspection."

"The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the "meaning" of life."

"The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words."

"If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God."

"The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death."

"As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad."

"I thought that the only action a man could perform without shame was to take his life; that he had no right to diminish himself in the succession of days and the inertic of misery. No elect, I kept telling myself, but those who committed suicide."

"I dream of wanting — and all I want seems to me worthless."

"To repeat to yourself a thousand times a day: 'Nothing on Earth has any worth,' to keep finding yourself at the same point, to circle stupidly as a top, eternally..."

"Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?"

"Nothing is indefensible — from the absurdest proposition to the most monstrous crime."

"History proves nothing because it contains everything."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The universal view melts things into a blur."

"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."

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

"Nothing proves that we are more than nothing."

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

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