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.
Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.
Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.
To get up in the morning, wash and then wait for some unforeseen variety of dread or depression. I would give the whole universe and all of Shakespeare for a grain of ataraxy.
To hope is to contradict the future.
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
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.
It is an understatement to say that in this society injustices abound: In truth it is itself the quintessence of injustice.
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.
Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.
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.
In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.
Tears do not burn except in solitude.
We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence.
Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.
Society: an inferno of saviors!
Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.
Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.