To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

The only free mind is one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

Everything turns on pain; the rest is accessory, even nonexistent, for we remember only what hurts. Painful sensations being the only real ones, it is virtually useless to experience others.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.