At this very moment, I am suffering – as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
Just as ecstasy purifies you of the particular and the contingent, leaving nothing except light and darkness, so insomnia kills off the multiplicity and diversity of the world, leaving you prey to your private obsessions.
What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!
Once you see that everything is unreal, you can’t see why you should bother to prove it.
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.
Lucidity’s task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.
Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
Society: an inferno of saviors!
All philosophers should end their days at Pythia’s feet. There is only one philosophy, that of unique moments.
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: “I want to be praised.”
What is pity but the vice of kindness.
If you’re unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.
Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
An existence transfigured by failure.
I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.
Tolerance cannot seduce the young.