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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know what that elsewhere is.
I have all the defects of other people and yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.
It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.
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.
To be objective is to treat others as you treat an object, a corpse – to behave with them like an undertaker.
If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.
It is an aberration to want to be different from what you are, to espouse in theory any and every condition, except your own.
‘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.
For the victim of anxiety, there is no difference between success and fiasco. His reaction to the one is the same as to the other: both trouble him equally.
When I torment myself a little too much for not working, I tell myself that I might just as well be dead and that then I would be working still less …
Deep inside, each man feels – and believes – himself to be immortal, even if he knows he will perish the next moment. We can understand everything, admit everything, realize everything, except our death, even when we ponder it unremittingly and even when we are resigned to it.
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.
