Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass – which is better than trying to fill them.
We must learn how to explode! Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
To accomplish nothing and die of the strain.
Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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.