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My faculty for disappointment surpasses understanding. It is what lets me comprehend Buddha, but also what keeps me from following him.
What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification.
An idea, a being, anything which becomes incarnate loses identity, turns grotesque.
For every discomfort is only an abortive metaphysical experience.
Lucidity is the only vice which makes us free—free in a desert.
What is known as “wisdom” is ultimately only a perpetual “thinking it over,” i.e., non-action as first impulse.
for it is likely that the apogee of metaphysical torment is to be located well before that universal insipidity which followed the advent of Philosophy.
“What do you do from morning to night?” “I endure myself.”
“Old age is nature’s self-criticism.”
I never met one interesting mind that was not richly endowed with inadmissible deficiencies.
Everything is unique—and insignificant.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
The wise man consents to everything, for he identifies himself with nothing. An opportunist without desires.
We understand what death is only by suddenly remembering the face of someone who has been a matter of indifference to us.
Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.
Every form of haste, even toward the good, betrays some mental disorder.
Our self-knowledge annoys and paralyzes our daimon—this is where we should look for the reason Socrates wrote nothing.
There is nothing to say about anything. So there can be no limit to the number of books.
It is not misfortune but happiness—insolent happiness, it is true—which leads to rancor and sarcasm.
A free man is one who has discerned the inanity of all points of view; a liberated man is one who has drawn the consequences of such discernment.
Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
The dissolving power of conversation. One realizes why both meditation and action require silence.
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.
We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.
In a metropolis as in a hamlet, what we still love best is to watch the fall of one of our kind.
