We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

There was a time when time did not yet exist. … The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

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.

An individual dies ... when, instead of taking risks and hurling himself toward being, he cowers within, and takes refuge there.

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.