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.