Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.