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.

Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.

What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

Philosophy is a corrective against sadness. Yet there still are people who believe in the profundity of philosophy!

A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?