To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

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.

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?

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.