Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?
No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.
What are you waiting for in order to give up?
You are done for – a living dead man – not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.
Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.
Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don’t suffer, time flows, so that they don’t live in time, in fact they never have.
Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
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.
He who hates himself is not humble.
Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
There is no limit to suffering.
An aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.
Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.