Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.
If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an ‘I’ without shame.
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.
One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
What a pity that ‘nothingness’ has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
Under each formula lies a corpse.
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Tolerance – the function of an extinguished ardor – tolerance cannot seduce the young.
To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.
To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.
There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.
The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.
The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.
One hardly saves a world without ruling it.