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.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

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

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

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

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

Word - that invisible dagger.

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