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.
Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.
Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.
What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?
The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.