We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

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.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

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

The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.