The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
We are all geniuses when we dream.
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.
Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.
Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.
If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.
No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; – for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.
To have committed every crime but that of being a father.
In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.
As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
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