The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

Between the demand to be clear and the temptation to be obscure, impossible to decide which deserves more respect.

There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing; but instead of nonchalantly promenading our own corruption, we exude our sweat and grow winded upon the fetid air.

Think of God and not religion, of ecstasy and not mysticism. The difference between the theoretician of faith and the believer is as great as between the psychiatrist and the psychotic.

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism — I don’t know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

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

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

Transmitting one’s flaws [through procreation] to someone else is a crime. I could never consent to give life to someone who would inherent my ailments.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we” with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke “others” and regard himself as their interpreter – for me to consider him my enemy.

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.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.

Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.

After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence.

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

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.

What are you waiting for in order to give up?

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

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

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

What is that one crucifixion compared to the daily kind any insomniac endures?

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

A civilization begins to decline the moment Life becomes its sole obsession.

One is and remains a slave as long as one is not cured of hoping.

I don’t understand how people can believe in God, even when I myself think of him everyday.

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

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

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass – which is better than trying to fill them.

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

This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique – and insignificant.

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

To read is to let someone else work for you – the most delicate form of exploitation.

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

Humanity adores only those who cause it to perish.

True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.

If we had the courage to confront the doubts we timidly conceive about ourselves, none of us would utter an ‘I’ without shame.

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

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

The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.

Time is heavy sometimes; imagine how heavy eternity must be.

The truly solitary being is not the man who is abandoned by men, but the man who suffers in their midst, who drags his desert through the marketplace and deploys his talents as a smiling leper, a mountebank of the irreparable.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

To act is to anchor in the imminent future.

The true hero fights and dies in the name of his destiny, and not in the name of a belief.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: “I want to be praised.

I am like a broken puppet whose eyes have fallen inside.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.

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

Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one’s mind, or to define oneself – there is no wish I make more often.

If you’re unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.

When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.” And they do calm down.

The Art of Love: knowing how to combine the temperament of a vampire with the discretion of an anemone.

He who hates himself is not humble.

Consciousness is nature’s nightmare.

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.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

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 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.

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

A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society

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

We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone ‘happy’, no greater flattery than to grant him a ‘vein of melancholy’… This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?

Psychoanalysis is a technique we practice at our cost; psychoanalysis degrades our risks, our dangers, our depths; it strips us of our impurities, of all that made us curious about ourselves.

Everything is pathology, except for indifference.

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

Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart’s drama and the negative meaning of history.

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

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

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

The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

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

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.

There was a time when time did not yet exist.

I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I’d have killed myself right away.

Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.

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

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.

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

A decadent civilization compromises with its disinfecease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

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

Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?

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

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

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.

Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

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

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

Only those moments count, when the desire to remain by yourself is so powerful that you’d prefer to blow your brains out than exchange a word with someone.

I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other. It is all the same whether you achieve something or not, have faith or not, just as it is all the same whether you cry or remain silent.

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

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal – less for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.

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

It is because we are all impostors that we endure each other. The man who does not consent to lie will see the earth shrink under his feet: we are biologically obliged to the false

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

To live in any sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.

dieTo accomplish nothing and die of the strain

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

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.

How easy it is to be “deep”: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.

How good would it be if one could die by throwing oneself into an infinite void.

Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one’s reach.

The sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love.

What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.

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

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

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.

Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others.

Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? Where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

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

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.

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

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

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

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth? —That’s what I’d like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual.

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

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

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.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.

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.

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