To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

 If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.

No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine: from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.

It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerance.

It is trifling to believe in what you do or in what others do. You should avoid simulacra and even “realities;” you should take up a position external to everything and everyone, drive off or grind down your appetites, live, according to a Hindu adage, with as few desires as a “solitary elephant.”

I forgive X everything because of his obsolete smile.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

Only what you hide is profound, is true. Whence the power of base feelings.

Ama nesari, says the Imitation of Christ. Love to be unknown. We are happy with ourselves and with the world only when we conform to this precept.

The intrinsic value of a book does not depend on the importance of its subject (else the theologians would prevail, and mightily), but on the manner of approaching the accidental and the insignificant, of mastering the infinitesimal. The essential has never required the least talent.

The feeling of being ten thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity …

Negation never proceeds from reasoning but from something much more obscure and old. Arguments come afterward, to justify and sustain it. Every no rises out of the blood.

With the help of the erosion of memory, to recall the first initiatives of matter and the risk of life which followed from them …

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

There are nights that the most ingenious torturers could not have invented. We emerge from them in pieces, stupid, dazed, with neither memories nor anticipations, and without even knowing who we are. And it is then that the day seems useless, light pernicious, even more oppressive than the darkness.

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man.

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.

I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

Considering things according to nature, man was made to live facing outward. If he would see into himself, he must close his eyes, renounce his endeavors, quit the immediate. What is called “inner life” is a belated phenomenon, possible only by a slowing down of our vital activities, “the soul” being able to emerge and elaborate itself only at the expense of the good behavior of our organs.

The merest atmospheric variation jeopardizes my plans, not to speak of my convictions. This kind of dependency—the most humiliating kind—unfailingly lays me low, even as it dissipates what few illusions remain as to my possibilities of being free and as to freedom itself. What is the use of swaggering if you are at the mercy of Wet and Dry? One craves a less lamentable bondage, and gods of another kidney.

It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

When you know quite absolutely that everything is unreal, you then cannot see why you should take the trouble to prove it.

As it leaves dawn behind and advances into the day, light prostitutes itself and is redeemed—ethics of twilight—only at the moment it vanishes.

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.

At increasingly wider intervals, impulses of gratitude toward Job and Chamfort—toward vociferation and vitriol …

Each opinion, each view is necessarily partial, truncated, inadequate. In philosophy and in anything, originality comes down to incomplete definitions.

If we consider closely our so-called generous actions, there is none which, from some aspect, is not blameworthy and even harmful, so that we come to regret having performed it—so that we must choose, finally, between abstention and remorse.

Explosive force of any mortification. Every vanquished desire affords us power. We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it. Renunciation confers an infinite power.

My disappointments, instead of converging toward a center and constituting if not a system at least an ensemble, are scattered, each supposing itself unique and thereby wasted, lacking organization.

The only successful philosophies and religions are the ones that flatter us, whether in the name of progress or of hell Damned or not, man experiences an absolute need to be at the heart of everything. It is, in fact, solely for this reason that he is man, that he has become man. And if some day he no longer feels this need, he must give way to some other animal prouder, madder than himself.

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 more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech, in the very symbol of nullity.

At the climax of a failure, at the moment when shame is about to do us in, suddenly we are swept away by a frenzy of pride which lasts only long enough to drain us, to leave us without energy, to lower, with our powers, the intensity of our shame.

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?

More than once, I have managed to leave my room, for if I had stayed there I could not be sure of being able to resist some sudden resolution. The street is more reassuring, you think less about yourself there, there everything weakens and wilts, beginning with your own confusion.

Characteristic of sickness to stay awake when everything sleeps, when everything is at rest, even the sick man.

When we are young, we take a certain pleasure in our infirmities. They seem so new, so rich! With age, they no longer surprise us, we know them too well. Now, without anything unexpected in them, they do not deserve to be endured.

Once we appeal to our most intimate selves, once we begin to labor and to produce, we lay claim to gifts, we become unconscious of our own gaps. No one is in a position to admit that what comes out of his own depths might be worthless. “Self-knowledge”? A contradiction in terms.

All these poems where it is merely the Poem that is in question—a whole poetry with no other substance than itself! What would we say of a prayer whose object was religion?

The mind that puts everything in question reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?

What a disappointment that Epicurus, the sage I most need, should have written over three hundred treatises! And what a relief that they are lost!

“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”

A remark of my brother’s apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: “Old age is nature’s self-criticism.”

“One must be mad or drunk,” the Abbe Sieyès said, to speak well in the known languages. One must be drunk or mad, I should add, to dare, still, to use words, any word….

The fanatic of elliptical gloom is sure to excel in any career save that of being a writer.

Having always lived in fear of being surprised by the worst, I have tried in every circumstance to get a head start, flinging myself into misfortune long before it occurred.

We do not envy those who have the capacity to pray, whereas we are filled with envy of the possessors of goods, of those who know wealth and fame. Strange that we resign ourselves to someone’s salvation and not to what fugitive advantages he may enjoy.

I never met one Interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.

No true art without a strong dose of banality. The constant employment of the unaccustomed readily wearies us, nothing being more unendurable than the uniformity of the exceptional.

The trouble with using a borrowed language is that you have no right to make too many mistakes in it. Now, it is by seeking a certain incorrectness without however abusing it, it is by continually approaching solecism, that writing may be given the appearance of life.

Each of us believes, quite unconsciously of course, that he alone pursues the truth, which the rest are incapable of seeking out and unworthy of attaining. This madness is so deep-rooted and so useful that it is impossible to realize what would become of each of us if it were someday to disappear.

The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.

To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse—to behave with them like an undertaker.

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.

Emily Brontë: everything that comes from her has the capacity to overwhelm me. Haworth is my Mecca.

To walk along a stream, to pass, to flow with the water, without effort, without haste, while death continues in us its ruminations, its uninterrupted soliloquy …

Only God has the privilege of abandoning us. Men can only drop us.

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

Plotinus, Porphyry tells us, had the gift of reading men’s souls. One day, without any warning, he told his astounded disciple not to try killing himself but rather to take a journey. Porphyry left for Sicily: there he was cured of his melancholy but, he adds regretfully, he thereby missed being present at his master’s death, which occurred during his absence.

It has been a long time since philosophers have read men’s souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.

A work exists only if it is elaborated in the darkness with attention, with all the care of the murderer plotting his crime. In both cases, what counts is the will to strike.

Self-knowledge—the bitterest knowledge of all and also the kind we cultivate least: what is the use of catching ourselves out, morning to night, in the act of illusion, pitilessly tracing each act back to its root, and losing case after case before our own tribunal?

Each time I have a lapse of memory, I think of the anguish which must afflict those who know they no longer remember anything. But something tells me that after a certain time a secret joy possesses them, a joy they would not agree to trade for any of their memories, even the most stirring….

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

The more you are a victim of contradictory impulses, the less you know which to yield to. To lack character—precisely that and nothing but.

Pure time, time decanted, freed of events, beings, and things, appears only at certain moments of the night, when you feel it coming on, with the one intention of sweeping you off toward an exemplary catastrophe.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born