Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.

Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

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

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.