“Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?”

Renunciation is the only kind of action that is not degrading.

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Anything that can be done seems to me pernicious and at best futile. If need be I can rouse myself but not act. I understand all too well Wordsworth’s description of Coleridge: eternal activity without action.

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“Amid your most intense activities, pause a moment to ‘consider’ your mind”—this advice is surely not offered to those who “consider” their minds night and day, and who thereby have no need to suspend their activities, for the good reason that they engage in none.

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If it is characteristic of the wise man to do nothing useless, no one will surpass me in wisdom: I do not even lower myself to useful things.

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“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.

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To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement!

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If I were to conform to my most intimate convictions, I should cease to take any action whatever, to react in any way. But I am still capable of sensations….

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Why docs the Gita rank “renunciation of the fruit of actions” so high? Because such renunciation is rare, impracticable, contrary to our nature, and because achieving it is destroying the man one has been and one is, killing in oneself the entire past, the work of millennia —in a word, freeing oneself of the Species, that hideous and immemorial riffraff.

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For lack of occupation, the old seem to be trying to solve something very complicated, devoting to it all the capacities they still possess. Perhaps this is why they do not commit suicide en masse, as they ought were they even a trifle less absorbed.

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If I recapitulate my plans which have remained plans and those which have worked out, I have every reason to regret that these latter have not suffered the fate of the former.

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“You’re against everything that’s been done since the last war,” said the very up-to-date lady.
“You’ve got the wrong date: I’m against everything that’s been done since Adam.”

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It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did—without a word—what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?

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To think is to undermine—to undermine oneself. Action involves fewer risks, for it fills the interval between things and ourselves, whereas reflection dangerously widens it.
… So long as I give myself up to physical exercise, manual labor, I am happy, fulfilled; once I stop, I am seized by dizziness, and I can think of nothing but giving up for good.

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Nothing deserves to be undone, doubtless because nothing deserved to be done. Hence we become detached from everything, from the original as well as from the ultimate, from advent as well as from collapse.

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A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing. . . . It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar.

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Each desire provokes in me a counterdesire, so that whatever I do, all that matters is what I have not done.

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One can be proud of what one has done, but one should be much prouder of what one has not done. Such pride has yet to be invented.

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To have accomplished nothing and to die overworked.

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I have so often stormed against any form of action that to manifest myself in any way at all seems an imposture, even a betrayal.
— Yet you go on breathing.
— Yes, I do everything that is done. But . . .

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To withdraw indefinitely into oneself, like God after the six days. Let us imitate Him, on this point at least.

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...If actions are mummery, the very refusal of action is one as well. Yet a noble mummery.

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Had I done what I intended, would I be happier today? Certainly not. Having set out to travel far, toward the extremity of myself, I have begun, on the way, to doubt my task, all tasks.

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Unrivaled in the worship of Impassivity, I have aspired to it frantically, so that the more I strained to achieve it, the further from it I found myself. A just defeat for a man who pursues a goal contrary to his nature.

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Anxiety, far from deriving from a nervous disequilibrium, is based on the very constitution of this world, and there is no reason why one should not be anxious at every moment, given that time itself is merely anxiety fully expanded, an anxiety whose beginning and end are indistinguishable, an eternally victorious anxiety.

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Everything is salutary, save to question ourselves moment by moment as to the meaning of our actions: everything is preferable to the only question that matters.

Cioran