Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes.
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.
God – a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
Truths begin by a conflict with the police – and end by calling them in.
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
History proves nothing because it contains everything.
Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.