What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

Try to be free: you will die of hunger.

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

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.

A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

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