One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism – I don’t know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!
The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.
We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.
True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.
Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness.
All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.
I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.
The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.
I do not forgive myself for being born. It is as if creeping into this world, I had profaned a mystery, betrayed some momentous pledge, committed a fault of nameless gravity.
I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark – a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.
True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.