There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

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.

History is nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degradation of the mind before the Improbable.

I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.

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

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.