The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.
We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.
As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy.
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
There is no limit to suffering.
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.
To live. . . in any sense of the word. . . is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence.
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
The need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.
Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.
I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.
Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.
The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.
There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.
Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent -unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it -we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude.
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.
Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an impostor.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.
History proves nothing because it contains everything.
To act is to anchor in the imminent future.