487 quotes
Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be . . . optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
In the fact of being born there is such an absence of necessity that when you think about it a little more than usual, you are left...with a foolish grin.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
So long as man is protected by madness he functions and flourishes, but when he frees himself from the fruitful tyranny of fixed ideas, he is lost, ruined.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
This very second has vanished forever, lost in the anonymous mass of the irrevocable. It will never return. I suffer from this and I do not. Everything is unique — and insignificant.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
The fear of your own solitude, of its vast surface and its infinity... Remorse is the voice of solitude. And what does this whispering voice say? Everything in us that is not human anymore.
The Book of Delusions (1936)
History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set their foot on the last rung, that of the absurd, have bequeathed to posterity only an example of sterility.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
All important things bear the sign of death: Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade to the void.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Late at night. I feel like falling into a frenzy, doing some unprecedented thing to release myself, but I don't see against whom, against what...
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one — any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action.
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
I do not hate life or desire death, I only regret being born. I prefer non-birth from life and death. The bliss of non-birth. The longer I live, the more willingly I give myself to the joy of non-birth.
Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it; hence the mind feels more comfortable in the society of a braggart than in that of a martyr; and nothing is more repugnant to it than the spectacle of dying for an idea.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
The notion of nothingness is not characteristic of laboring humanity: those who toil have neither time nor inclination to weigh their dust; they resign themselves to the difficulties or the doltishness of fate; they hope: hope is a slave's virtue.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity; — for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret.
The Book of Delusions (1936)
Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
...all of the philosophers put together are not worth a single saint.
Tears and Saints (1937)
Bach: a scale of tears upon which our desires for God ascend.
A Short History of Decay (1949)