"What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you - what a revelation."

"We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune."

"So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes."

"Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there."

"Negation is the mind's first freedom, yet a negative habit is fruitful only so long as we exert ourselves to overcome it, adapt it to our needs; once acquired it can imprison us."

"When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves."

"Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui."

"The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster."

"In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws."

"Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off."

"To act is to anchor in the imminent future."

"Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart."

"Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."

"The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself."

"The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one."

"I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers."

"The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it."

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

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

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

"Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers."

"Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself."

"Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?"

"Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen."

"Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself."

"A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb."

"Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory."

"A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech."

"We inhabit a language rather than a country."

"Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth."

"Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in."

"Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness."

"For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion."

"Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it."

"Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers."

"In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world."

"We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us."

"A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate."

"Sperm is a bandit in its pure state."

"A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed."

"Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all."

"We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void."

"Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?"

"Our first intuitions are the true ones."

"The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility."

"No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one."

"To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring."

"The limit of every pain is an even greater pain."

"We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves."

"Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors."