The final step toward indifference is the destruction of the very notion of indifference

 Two kinds of intuitions: original (Homer, Upanishads, folklore) and belated (Mahayana Buddhism, Roman stoicism, Alexandrian gnosis). First flashes and fading glows. The wakening of consciousness and the lassitude of being awakened.

If it is true that what perishes has never existed, birth, source of the perishable, exists as little as the rest

Beware of euphemisms! They aggravate the horror they are supposed to disguise. To use, as the French do, “the disappeared” instead of the deceased or the dead man, seems to me preposterous, even insane.

When man forgets he is mortal, he feels inclined to do great things, and sometimes succeeds. This oblivion, fruit of excess, is at the same time the cause of his woes. “Mortal, think as a mortal.” Antiquity invented a tragic modesty.

Of all the equestrian statues of Roman emperors, the only one to survive the barbarian invasions and the erosion of the ages is that of Marcus Aurelius—the least “emperor” of all and the one who would have adapted himself to any other condition.

Getting up with my head full of plans, I would be working, I was sure of it, all morning long. No sooner had I sat down at my desk than the odious, vile, and persuasive refrain: “What do you expect of this world?” stopped me short. And I returned, as usual, to my bed with the hope of finding some answer, of going back to sleep. …

We make choices, decisions, as long as we keep to the surface of things; once we reach the depths, we can neither choose nor decide, we can do nothing but regret the surface….

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.

It is a withering process to follow a doctrine, a belief, a system—for a writer especially; unless he lives, as often happens, in contradiction with the ideas to which he appeals. This contradiction, or this treason, stimulates him and keeps him in a state of insecurity, embarrassment, shame—conditions favorable to production.

Paradise was the place where everything was known but where nothing was explained. The universe before sin—before commentary …

I have no faith, luckily. If I had, I should live in constant fear of losing it. Hence, far from helping me, it would do nothing but injure me.

An impostor, a “humbug,” conscious of being so and therefore a self-spectator, is necessarily more advanced in knowledge than a steady mind ‘full of merits and all of a piece.

Anyone possessing a body is entitled to be called a reprobate. If he is afflicted with a “soul” as well, there is no anathema to which he cannot lay claim.

How are we to speak to someone who has lost everything? What language shall we use? The most diffuse, the vaguest, will always be the most effective.

Supremacy of regret: the actions we have not performed constitute, by the very fact that they pursue us and that we continually think about them, the sole contents of our consciousness.

Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal—less’for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.”

No longer wanting to be a man …, dreaming of another form of failure.

Each time you find yourself at a turning-point, the best thing is to lie down and let the hours pass. Resolutions made standing up are worthless: they are dictated either by pride or by fear. Prone, we still know these two scourges, but in a more attenuated, more intemporal form.

When someone complains that his life has come to nothing, we need merely remind him that life itself is in an analogous situation, if not worse.

Works die: fragments, not having lived, cannot die either.

Horror of the accessory paralyzes me. Now, the accessory is the essence of communication (and hence of thought), it is the flesh and blood of speech and writing. Trying to renounce it is like fornicating with a skeleton.

The satisfaction we take from performing a task (especially when we have no belief in the task and even disdain it) shows to what degree we still belong to the rabble.

My merit is not to be totally ineffectual but to have wanted to be.

If I do not deny my origins, it is because it is ultimately better to be nothing at all than a pretense of something.

A mixture of automatism and whim, man is a robot with defects, a robot out of order. If only he remains so, and is not some day put right!

What every man, whether he has patience or not, has always expected is, of course, death. But he knows this only when death comes …, when it is too late to be able to enjoy it.

Man certainly began praying long before he knew how to speak, for the pangs he must have suffered upon leaving animality, upon denying it, could not have been endured without grunts and groans, préfigurations, premonitory signs of prayer.

In art and in everything, the commentator is generally better informed and more lucid than the subject of commentary. This is the advantage the murderer has over his victim.

“Let us offer our thanks to the gods, who keep no one in this life by force.” Seneca (whose style, according to Caligula, lacks cement) is open to the essential, and this not so much because of his affiliation with stoicism as because of his eight-years’ exile in Corsica, particularly desolate at the time. This ordeal conferred upon a frivolous writer a dimension he would not have acquired in the normal course of events; it relieved him of the aid of a sickness.

Mine still, this moment passes by, escapes me, and is buried forever. Am I going to commit myself with the next? I make up my mind: it is here, it belongs to me—and already is long since past. From morning to night, fabricating the past!

After having, to no avail, tried everything among the mystics, he had only one recourse: to founder in wisdom….

Once you ask yourself so-called philosophical questions and employ the inevitable jargon, you assume a superior, aggressive manner, and this in a realm where, the insoluble being de rigueur, humility should be also. This anomaly is merely apparent: the more formidable the questions you confront, the more you lose your head: ultimately you bestow on yourself the dimensions they possess. If the pride of theologians “stinks” even more than that’of the philosophers, it is because one decs not concern oneself with God with impunity: one reaches the point of arrogating to oneself certain of His attributes—the worst, of course.

At peace with itself and the world, the mind atrophies. It flourishes at the slightest contrariety. Thought is really no more than the shameless exploitation of our embarrassments and our disgraces.

This body, once loyal, disavows me, no longer follows me, has ceased to be my accomplice. Rejected, betrayed, discarded, what would become of me if old infirmities, to prove their allegiance, didn’t come to keep me company at every hour of the day and night?

“Distinguished” people do not invent in matters of language. On the contrary, the ones who excel there are those who improvise out of boastfulness or who wallow in a sentimental coarseness. Such men are “natures,” they live on the level of words. Is verbal genius, then, the concomitant of low haunts? In any case, it requires a certain minimum of odium.

We should keep to a single language, and deepen our knowledge of it at every opportunity. For a writer, gossiping with a concierge in his own is much more profitable than arguing with a scholar in a foreign tongue.

“… the feeling of being everything and the evidence of being nothing.” I happened across this phrase in my youth, and was overwhelmed by it. Everything I felt in those days, and everything I would feel from then on, was summed up in this eitraordinary banal formula, the synthesis of expansion and failure, ecstasy and impasse. Most often it is not in a paradox but in a truism that a revelation appears.

Poetry excludes calculation and premeditation: it is incompletion, foreboding, abyss. Neither a singsong geometry, nor a succession of bloodless adjectives. We are too deeply wounded and too despondent, too weary and too barbarous in our weariness, to appreciate, yet, the craft.

We cannot do without the notion of progress, yet it does not deserve our attention. It is like the “meaning” of life. Life must have one. But is there any which does not turn out, upon examination, to be ludicrous?

Trees are massacred, houses go up—faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

There is something enveloping and voluptuous about the notion of fatality: it keeps you warm.

A troglodyte that will have passed through all the nuances of satiety….

The pleasure of slandering yourself greatly exceeds that of being slandered.

Better than anyone I know the danger of being born with a thirst for everything. A poisoned gift, a vengeance of Providence. Thus encumbered, I could get nowhere, on the spiritual level, of course, the only one that matters. Anything but accidental, my failure is identified with my essence.

The mystics and their “collected works.” When one addresses oneself to God, and to God alone, as they claim to do, one should be careful not to write. God doesn’t read….

Each time I think of the Essential, I seem to glimpse it in silence or explosion, in stupor or exclamation. Never in speech.

When you meditate all day on the inopportuneness of birth, everything you plan and everything you perform seems pathetic, futile. You are like a madman who, cured, does nothing but think of the crisis from which he has emerged, the “dream” he has left behind; he keeps harking back to it, so that his cure is of no benefit to him whatever.

The appetite for torment is for some what the lure of gain is for others.

Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in Paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.

I shall never understand how we can live knowing that we are not—to say the least!—eternal.

The ideal being? An angel ravaged by humor.

When, after a series of questions about desire, disgust, and serenity, Buddha was asked: “What is the goal, the final meaning of nirvana?” he did not answer. He smiled. There has been a great deal of commentary on that smile, instead of seeing it as a normal reaction to a pointless question. It is what we do when confronted by a child’s why. We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question. Children admit no limits to anything; they always want to see beyond, to see what there is afterward. But there is no afterward. Nirvana is a limit, the limit It is Iteration, supreme impasse….

Existence might well have had some attraction before the advent of noise—let us say, before the neolithic age. When will he come, the man who can rid us of all men?

For all we tell ourselves’ about not outliving a stillborn babe, instead of clearing out at the first opportunity, we cling, with lunatic energy, to one day more.

Lucidity docs not extirpate the desire to live—far from it, lucidity merely makes us unsuited to life.

God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

Unconsciousness is the secret, the “vital principle” of life…. It is the sole recourse against the self, against the disease of being individualized, against the debilitating effect of the state of consciousness, a state so formidable, so demanding, that it must be reserved for athletes alone.

Any success, in any realm, involves an inner impoverishment It makes us forget what we are, it deprives us of the torment of our limits.

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

To have foundered somewhere between the epigram and the sigh!

Suffering opens our eyes, helps us to see what we would not have seen otherwise. Hence it is useful only to knowledge and, except for that, serves only to poison existence. Which, one may add in passing, favors knowledge further. “He has suffered—hence he has understood.” This is all we can say of a victim of disease, injustice, or of any kind of misfortune. Suffering improves no one (except those who were already good), it is forgotten as all things are forgotten, it does not enter into “humanity’s patrimony” nor preserve itself in any way at all—it wastes itself as everything is wasted. Once again, it serves only to open our eyes.

Man has said what he had to say. He should rest now. But refuses, and though he has entered into his “survivor” phase, he fidgets as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.

A cry means something only in a created universe. If there is no creator, what is the good of calling attention to yourself?

Nerval: “Having reached the Place de la Concorde, my thought was to kill myself” Nothing in all French literature has haunted me as much as that.

In everything, only the beginning and the outcome matter, doing and undoing. The way toward being and the way out of being—that is breathing, whereas being as such is merely an asphyxiator.

With the passage of time, I am convinced that my first years were a paradise. But I am undoubtedly mistaken. If there was ever a paradise, I must look for it earlier than all my years.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself …

The more man is man, the more he loses in reality: it is the price he must pay for his distinct essence. If he managed to achieve the limits of his singularity, if he were to become man totally, absolutely, there would no longer be anything in him which would suggest any kind of existence at all.

Silence in the face of the decrees of fate, the rediscovery, after centuries of thundering prayer, of the ancient Be still—there is our aspiration, there our struggle, if such a word is appropriate to a foreseen and accepted defeat.

Every success is ignominious; we never get over it—in our own eyes, of course.

The pangs of truth about ourselves are more than we can endure. How pitiable the man (if such a being exists) who no longer lies to himself!

I shall no longer read the sages—they have done me too much harm. I should have surrendered to my instincts, let my madness flourish. I have done just the opposite, I have put on the mask of reason, and the mask has ended by replacing my face and usurping all the rest.

In my moments of megalomania, I tell myself that it is impossible my diagnoses should be mistaken, that I have only to be patient, to wait until the end, until the advent of the last man, the one being in a position to substantiate me….

The notion that it would have been better never to exist is among those which meet with the most opposition. Every man, incapable of seeing himself except from inside, regards himself as necessary, even indispensable, every man feels and perceives himself as an absolute reality, as a whole, as the whole. The moment we identify ourselves entirely with our own being, we react like God, we are God.

It is only when we live at once within and on the margins of ourselves that we can conceive, quite calmly, that it would have been preferable that the accident we are should never have occurred.

If I followed my natural inclination, I should blow up the world. And it is because I lack the courage to follow it that, out of penitence, I try to stupefy myself with the company of those who have found peace.

A writer has left his mark on us not because we have read him a great deal but because we have thought of him more than is warranted. I have not frequented Baudelaire or Pascal particularly, but I have not stopped thinking of their miseries, which have accompanied me everywhere as faithfully as my own.

At each age, more or less distinct signs warn us that it is time to decamp. We hesitate, we procrastinate, convinced that, once old age has come at last, these signs will become so clear that any further vacillation would be unsuitable. Clear they are, indeed, but we lack sufficient vigor to perform the one decent action a living man can commit.

Our physiological miseries help us to envisage the future with some confidence: they dispense us from tormenting ourselves overmuch, they do their test so that none of our long-range projects has time to wear out all our available energies.

The Empire was falling, the Barbarians were on the move…. What was to be done, except to escape the age? Happy moment, when there was still somewhere to go, when the empty places were accessible and welcoming! We have been dispossessed of everything, even the desert.

For the man who has got in the nasty habit of unmasking appearances, event and misunderstanding are synonyms. To make for the essential is to throw up the game, to admit one is defeated.

X is undoubtedly right to compare himself to a “volcano,” but wrong to go into details.

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

The early Greeks regarded the psyche as no more than air, wind, or at test smoke, and one readily agrees with them every time one wearies of foraging in one’s own ego or that of others, searching for strange and, if possible, suspect depths.

The final step toward indifference is the destruction of the very notion of indifference.

Walking in a forest between two hedges of ferns transfigured by autumn—that is a triumph. What are ovations and applause beside it?

To deprecate your own kind, to vilify and pulverize them, to attack their foundations, to undermine your very basis, to destroy your point of departure, to punish your origins …, to curse all those non-elect, lesser breeds, torn between imposture and elegy, whose sole mission is not to have one …

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.

When the habit of seeing things as they are turns into a mania, we lament the madman we have been and are no longer.

Cioran 

The Trouble With Being Born