There’s no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people’s expense.
I have all the conditions for happiness, save happiness. The conditions are detached from one another.
Everything belongs to someone else, except the pain of not having it.
But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all.
Every man of action is basically cheerful and optimistic, because those who don’t feel are happy. You can spot a man of action by the fact he’s never out of sorts.
Every gesture is a dead dream.
To conceive of myself from the outside was my ruin – the ruin of my happiness. I saw myself as others see me, and I despised myself – not because I had character traits that made me worthy of contempt, but because I saw myself through the eyes of others, and felt the contempt they feel towards me. I experienced the humiliation of knowing myself.
Wise is the man who monotonizes his existence, for then each minor incident seems a marvel.
The higher a man rises, the more things he must do without. There’s no room on the pinnacle except for the man himself. The more perfect he is, the more complete; and the more complete, the less other.
However, when you’re about to write something, knowing beforehand that it’s sure to be imperfect, a failure, that is the most spiritually tormenting and humiliating of feelings. I not only feel that the lines I write are unsatisfactory, I know that I will find any lines I write in the future equally unsatisfactory.
The only intellectual attitude worthy of a superior creature is a feeling of calm, cool compassion for everything that is not himself.
My isolation is not a search for happiness, which I do not have the heart to win, nor for peace, which one finds only when it will never more be lost; what I seek is sleep, extinction, a small surrender.
I forget. I don’t see. I don’t think.
Life is the hesitation between an exclamation mark and a question mark. After doubt there is a full stop.
His voice was hesitant and colourless, as in those who hope for nothing because it’s perfectly useless to hope.
We generally colour our ideas of the unknown with our notions of the known.
My self-critical mind allows me to see only the defects and faults in my own work, and so I only have the courage to write snippets and snatches, brief notes on the theme of nonexistence, and yet even the little I write is imperfect.
And when the lie begins to give us pleasure, let us speak the truth in order to lie to the lie.
Art frees us, through illusion, from the squalor of being.
How wearisome to let one’s existence become something absolutely dependent on someone else’s feelings; to have no option but to feel, to love a little too, whether or not it is reciprocated.