Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Consider love: is there a nobler outpouring, a rapture less suspect? Its shudders rival music, compete with the tears of solitude and of ecstasy: sublime...but a sublimity inseperable from the urinary tract: transports bordering upon excretion, a heaven of the glands, sudden sancitity of the orifices. It takes no more than a moment of attention for this intoxication, shaken, to cast you back into the ordures of physiology or a moment of fatigue to recognize that so much ardor produces only a variety of mucous.

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.