487 quotes
Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
To live in a saint's heart? I'm afraid of setting the sky ablaze.
Tears and Saints (1937)
Death poses a problem which replaces all the others. What is deadly to philosophy, to the naive belief in the hierarchy of perplexities.
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
Self-pity is not as sterile as we suppose. Once we feel its mere onset, we assume a thinker's attitude, and come to think of it, we come to think!
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
In the torments of the intellect, there is a certain bearing which is to be sought in vain among those of the heart. Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety.
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
I think of so many people who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
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.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.
The Temptation to Exist (1956)
Long before physics or psychology were born, pain disintegrated matter, and affliction the soul.
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
Incredible that the prospect of having a biographer has made no one renounce having a life.
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
On the frontiers of the self: "What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I."
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Tolerance — the function of an extinguished ardor — tolerance cannot seduce the young.
History and Utopia (1960)
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence.
History and Utopia (1960)
The poor maidservant who used to say that she only believed in God when she had a toothache puts all theologians to shame.
Tears and Saints (1937)
When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
All the concessions we make to Eros are holes in our desire for the absolute.
The Book of Delusions (1936)