By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say “we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.

I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.

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

Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.