"To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy."

"We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle."

"They ask you for facts, proofs, works, and all you can show them are transformed tears."

"The only subversive mind is the one that questions the obligation to exist; all the others, the anarchist at the top of the list, compromise with the established order."

"Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth."

"What place do we occupy in the "universe"? A point, if that! Why reproach ourselves when we are evidently so insignificant? Once we make this observation, we grow calm at once: henceforth, no more bother, no more frenzy, metaphysical or otherwise. And then that point dilates, swells, substitutes itself for space. And everything begins all over again."

"Skepticism is an exercise in defascination."

"When you know that every problem is only a false problem, you are dangerously close to salvation."

"To suffer is to produce knowledge."

"It is unjust to call imaginary the diseases which are, on the contrary, only too real, since they proceed from our mind, the only regulator of our equilibrium and our health."

"The skeptic is the least mysterious man in the world, and yet, starting from a certain moment, he no longer belongs to this world."

"An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm."

"There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be."

"To conceive a thought — just one, but one that would tear the universe to pieces."

"I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws."

"The mind advances only when it has the patience to go in circles, in other words, to deepen."

"Refinement is a sign of a deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything."

"To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root."

"When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever."

"Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from destroying our last vestiges of naivete. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent."

"Endless brooding over a question undermines you as much as a dull pain."

"Only those moments count when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than to exchange a word with someone."

"Why don't I kill myself? If I knew exactly what keeps me from doing so, I should have no more questions to ask myself since I should have answered them all."

"A man does not kill himself, as is commonly supposed, in a fit of madness but rather in a fit of unendurable lucidity, in a paroxysm which may, if so desired, be identified with madness; for an excessive perspicacity, carried to the limit and of which one longs to be rid at all costs, exceeds the context of reason."

"Facing a landscape annihilated by the light, to remain serene supposes a temper I do not have. The sun is my purveyor of black thoughts; and summer the season when I have always reconsidered my relations with this world and with myself, to the greatest prejudice of both."

"The flesh spreads, further and further, like a gangrene upon the surface of the globe. It cannot impose limits upon itself, it continues to be rife despite its rebuffs, it takes its defeats for conquests, it has never learned anything. It belongs above all to the realm of the Creator, and it is indeed in the flesh that He has projected His maleficent instincts."

"In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between life and death."

"Always to have lived with the nostalgia to coincide with something, but not really knowing with what — it is easy to shift from unbelief to belief, or conversely. But what is there to convert to, and what is there to abjure, in a state of chronic lucidity?"

"In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable."

"It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the Good Lord — "Our Father" — had a hand in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests that He took no part in it, that it proceeds from a god without scruples, a feculent god. Goodness does not create, lacking imagination; it takes imagination to put together a world, however botched. At the very least, there must be a mixture of good and evil in order to produce an action or a work."

"It is debasing to die the way one does; it is intolerable to be exposed to an end over which we have no control, an end which lies in wait for us, overthrows us, casts us into the unnameable."

"To reckon on anything at all, here or elsewhere, is to afford proofs that we are still burdened with chains. The reprobate aspires to paradise; this aspiration disparages, compromises him. To be free is to rid yourself forever of the notion of reward, it is to expect nothing of men or gods, it is to renounce not only this world and all worlds but salvation itself—it is to destroy even the notion of it, that chain among chains."

"The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility."

"Jean Paul calls the most important night of his life the one when he discovered there was no difference between dying the next day or in thirty years. A revelation as significant as it is futile; if we occasionally manage to grasp its cogency, we resist on the other hand drawing its consequences, in immediacy the difference in question seeming to each of us somehow irreducible, even absolute: to exist is to prove that we have not understood to what point it is all one and the same thing to die now or no matter when."

"We should, out of decency, choose for ourselves the moment to disappear."

"“Meeting, after several years, someone we used to know as a child, the first glance almost always suggests that some great disaster must have befallen him” Leopardi, quoted by cioran."

"Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence."

"Creation is in fact a fault, man's famous sin thereby appearing as a minor version of a much graver one. What are we guilty of, except of having followed, more or less slavishly, the Creator's example? Easy to recognize in ourselves the fatality which was His: not for nothing have we issued from the hands of a wicked and woebegone god, a god accursed."

"He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama."

"There is only this swarm of dying creatures stricken with longevity, all the more hateful in that they are so good at organizing their agony."

"Love, a tacit agreement between two unhappy parties to overestimate each other."

"We are all secularised anarchists today."

"Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?"

"To act is to anchor in the imminent future."

"What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you — what a revelation."

"That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit."

"Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism."

"Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?"

"Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."