Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing – between two fictions.
I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.
True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one’s victories as defeats.
We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime...
My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.
If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an ‘I’ without shame.
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
What a pity that ‘nothingness’ has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
Under each formula lies a corpse.
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Tolerance – the function of an extinguished ardor – tolerance cannot seduce the young.
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.