We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

I have all the defects of other people yet everything they do seems to me inconceivable.

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost.