God – a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.
Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.
Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.
A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.
Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.
Truths begin by a conflict with the police – and end by calling them in.
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.
What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.
History proves nothing because it contains everything.
Tyrants are always assassinated too late. That is their great excuse.
In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
What does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?
I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.
There was a time when time did not yet exist.
To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
To have committed every crime but that of being a father.