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I know that my birth is fortuitous, a laughable accident, and yet, as soon as I forget myself, I behave as if it were a capital event, indispensable to the progress and equilibrium of the world.
As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes. When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.
think of so many friends who are no more, and I pity them. Yet they are not so much to be pitied, for they have solved every problem, beginning with the problem of death.
“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”
The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.
We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own.
In permitting man, Nature has committed much more than a mistake in her calculations: a crime against herself.
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.
A book is a postponed suicide.
Everything that lives makes noise. What an argument for the mineral kingdom!
No one has been so convinced as I of the futility of everything; and no one has taken so tragically so many futile things.
Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser.
With sufficient perspective, nothing is good or bad. The historian who ventures to judge the past is writing journalism in another century.
The worst crimes are committed out of enthusiasm, a morbid state responsible for almost all public and private disasters.
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.
When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings.
Sometimes I wish I were a cannibal—less “for the pleasure of eating someone than for the pleasure of vomiting him.
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.
No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
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.
