Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.

When every man has realized that his birth is a defeat, existence, endurable at last, will seem like the day after a surrender, like the relief and the repose of the conquered.

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

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.