The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?

I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.