If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised."
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique - and insignificant.
Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.
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.
Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
What do you do from morning to night?" "I endure myself.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.
Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, chaos is being yourself.
As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.
There was a time when time did not yet exist.
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.
I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you'd prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.
It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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