Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end by resembling my latest enemy.

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!

To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.

I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?