99 quotes
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)
We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
I used to ask myself, over a coffin: “What good did it do the occupant to be born?,” I now put the same question about anyone alive.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
If death is as horrible as is claimed, how is it that after the passage of a certain period of time we consider happy any being, friend or enemy, who has ceased to live?
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
I long to be free — desperately free. Free as the stillborn are free.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
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.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
It is a great force, and a great fortune, to be able to live without any ambition whatever. I aspire to it, but the very fact of so aspiring still participates in ambition.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Obviously God was a solution, and obviously none so satisfactory that will ever be found again.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
I react like everyone else, even like those I most despise; but I make up for it by deploring every action I commit, good or bad.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity...
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Buddhism calls anger "corruption of the mind," Manicheism "root of the tree of death." I know this, but what good does it do me to know?
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character — precisely that and nothing more.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Having destroyed all my connections, burned my bridges, I should feel a certain freedom, and in fact I do. One so intense I am afraid to rejoice in it.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)