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.
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.
The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.
No human beings are more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief.
He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama.
Basis of society: anonymous sweat.
The universal view melts things into a blur.
Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.
Reality is a creation of our excesses.