Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?
If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...
No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.
If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.
I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.
Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.
A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society.
Read day and night, devour books – these sleeping pills – not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
Tears do not burn except in solitude.
One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism – I don’t know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!
The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.