 Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves. |
| Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty. |
| Everything is pathology, except for indifference. |
| Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave. |
| Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off. |
| No one can enjoy freedom without trembling. |
| Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all. |
| Nothing proves that we are more than nothing. |
| So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes. |
| 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. |
| Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls. |
| Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth. |
| Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil. |
| 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. |
| Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh. |
| Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious. |
| When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves. |
| Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there. |
| To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten. |
| By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing. |
