No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live – moreover, the only one.
We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
One doesn’t live in a country, one lives in a language.
We are all geniuses when we dream.
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
Consciousness is nature’s nightmare.
Existing is plagiarism.
Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.
I have always lived with the awareness of the impossibility of living. And what has made existence endurable to me is my curiosity as to how I would get from one minute, one day, one year to the next.
Espousing the melancholy of ancient symbols, I would have freed myself.
Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.
Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.
To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell.
A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.