487 quotes
"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" — That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
The reasons for persisting in Being seem less and less well founded, and our successors will find it easier than we to be rid of such obstinacy.
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
"Where do you get those superior airs of yours?" "I've managed to survive, you see, all those nights when I wondered: am I going to kill myself at dawn?"
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Reality is a creation of our excesses.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Only the idiot is equipped to breathe.
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
Tears do not burn except in solitude.
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
Sadness makes you God's prisoner.
Tears and Saints (1937)
He detested objective truths, the burden of argument, sustained reasoning. He disliked demonstrating, he wanted to convince no one. Others are a dialectician's invention.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
If I were asked to summarize as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
Since it is difficult to approve the reasons people invoke, each time we leave one of our 'fellow men', the question which comes to mind is invariably the same: how does he keep from killing himself?
A Short History of Decay (1949)
As incompetent in life as in death, I loathe myself and in this loathing I dream of another life, another death. And for having sought to be a sage such as never was, I am only a madman among the mad.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
maybe suffering has no more justification than life.
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
A person who wakes up after a night of unbroken sleep has the illusion of beginning something new. When one instead remains awake the whole night long, nothing new begins.
How can you know if you are in the truth? The criterion is simple enough: if others make a vacuum around you, there is not a doubt in the world that you are closer to the essential than they are.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
Heroes abound at the dawn of civilizations, during pre-Homeric and Gothic epochs, when people, not having yet experienced spiritual torture, satisfy their thirst for renunciation through a derivative: heroism.
Tears and Saints (1937)
Even when he turns from religion, man remains subject to it; depleting himself to create false gods, he then feverishly adopts them; his need for fiction, for mythology triumphs over evidence and absurdity alike.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.
Anathemas and Admirations (1987)
God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.