Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

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.

Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.

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 does the future, that half of time, matter to the man who is infatuated with eternity?

When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula… to give a facade tot he void.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name – and moving on.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

Glory – once achieved, what is it worth?

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.

My mission is to kill time, and time’s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

Negation is the mind’s first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us.

Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

Word – that invisible dagger.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland – and no other.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live – moreover, the only one.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

You are done for – a living dead man – not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself.

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.

Life inspires more dread than death – it is life which is the great unknown.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

Jealousy – that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

To Live signifies to believe and hope – to lie and to lie to oneself.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.

It is because we are all imposters that we endure each other.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you – what a revelation.

Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation’s paradise and its tomb.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

So long as man is protected by madness – he functions – and flourishes.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven’t been cut off.

God – a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

Tolerance – the function of an extinguished ardor – tolerance cannot seduce the young.

We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.

There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police – and end by calling them in.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.