The Book of Disquiet

"Great melancholies and sorrows full of tedium can exist only in an atmosphere of comfort and solemn luxury.(464)"

"When we constantly live in the abstract, be it the abstraction of thought itself or of thought sensations, then quite against our own sentiment or will the things of the real world soon become phantoms - even those things which, given our particular personality, we should feel most keenly.(468)"

"When we live by the imagination, we exhaust our capacity for imagining, and especially for imagining what's real. Mentally living off what doesn't and can never exist, we lose our ability to ponder what can exist.(468)"

"I suffer from not suffering,from not knowing how to suffer.(468)"

"Even writing has lost its appeal. To express emotions in words and to produce well-wrought sentences has become so banal it's like eating or drinking, something I do with greater or lesser interest but always with a certain detachment, and without real enthusiasm or brilliance.(469)"

"To attain the satisfaction of the mystic state without having to endure its rigours; to be the ecstatic followers of no god, the mystic or epopt with no initiation; to pass the days meditating on a paradise you don't believe in - all of this tastes good to the soul that knows it knows nothing.(472)"

"Man shouldn't be able to see his own face - there's nothing more sinister. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.(466)"

"Every sound mind believes in God. No sound mind believes in a definite God.(473)"

"Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time's fleeing is for me an anguish, and life's mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets - if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life.(481)"

"I'm talking metaphysics? But all of life is a metaphysics in the darkness, with a vague murmur of the gods and only one way to follow, which is our ignorance of the right way.(The River of Possession)"

"What does all this amount to but the search for happiness? And does anyone search for anything else? (self examination)"

"Has this attitude brought me something new? Not even this consolation is mine. Everything was already said long ago, by Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes: Life Life is a child's game in the sand... vanity and vexation of spirit... And in that single phrase of poor Job: My soul is weary of my life. (self examination)"

"I feel so sick inside, and without even a little originality in my sickness... I do what others have done before me... I suffer what's old and hackneyed... Why do I even think these things, when so many have already thought and suffered them?...(self examination)"