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

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

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

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

Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

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

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

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

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

Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.

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

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

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

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

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

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

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.

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

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

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

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

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

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

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

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

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

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

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

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

However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.

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

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

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

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

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

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

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.

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

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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