Nothing sweeter than to drag oneself along behind events; and nothing more reasonable. But without a strong dose of madness, no initiative, no enterprise, no gesture. Reason: the rust of our vitality. It is the madman in us who forces us to adventure; once he abandons us, we are lost; everything depends on him, even our vegetative life; it is he who invites us, who obliges us to breathe, and it is also he who forces our blood to venture through our veins. Once he withdraws, we are alone indeed! We cannot be normal and alive at the same time.

Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

We dread the future only when we are not sure we can kill ourselves when we want to.

If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.