36 quotes
Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and which has not ended badly.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
What sin have you committed to be born, what crime to exist?
I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.
Drawn and Quartered (1979)
Once again, I want to pray, cry. dissolve, be nothing, return to the initial zero from before birth.
Everything that is engenders, sooner or later, nightmares. Let us try, therefore, to invent something better than being.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?
When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.
Can it really be that for us existence means exile, and nothingness, home?
On the Heights of Despair (1934)
Buddhism – the ultimate attempt to put an end to birth. This is what nirvana is. "There will be no more birth", would say the angel of the Buddhist Apocalypse.
In Buddhist writings, mention is often made of "the abyss of birth". An abyss indeed, a gulf into which we do not fall but from which, instead, we emerge, to our universal chagrin.
It is the stroke of midnight. I feel lonely in the face of despair stronger than me. And again I take refuge in the time before I was born.
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
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.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.
Tears and Saints (1937)
The problem of responsibility would make sense only if we were asked for an opinion before our birth and if we agreed to be the ones we are.
Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.
All Gall Is Divided (1952)
Nothing is a better proof of how far humanity has regressed than the impossibility of finding a single nation, a single tribe, among whom birth still provokes mourning and lamentations.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy.
The Trouble With Being Born (1973)
The moments follow each other; nothing lends them the illusion of a content or the appearance of a meaning; they pass; their course is not ours; we contemplate that passage, prisoners of a stupid perception.
A Short History of Decay (1949)
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)