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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

One should live and die where one was born... I've been bored everywhere I went. What was the point of leaving Coasta Boacu?

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.

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

Under each formula lies a corpse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

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