The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
My mission is to kill time, and time’s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you – what a revelation.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation’s paradise and its tomb.
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.
A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.
We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.
We inhabit a language rather than a country.
The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.
So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes.
Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.