Trees are massacred, houses go up – faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.
Our first intuitions are the true ones.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Normal people have nothing to forget.
Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.
How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.
Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!
History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
A regret understood by no one: the regret to be a pessimist. It’s not easy to be on the wrong foot with life.
Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.
Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?
The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.
To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!
The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.
Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.
We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.