My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person
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.
The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.
To hope is to contradict the future.
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
True contact between beings is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.
True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
The universal view melts things into a blur.
We derive our vitality from our store of madness.
Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?
What a pity that 'nothingness' has been devalued by an abuse of it made by philosophers unworthy of it!
A sensation must have fallen very low to deign to turn into an idea.
What is pity but the vice of kindness.
What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.
Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.
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.
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.