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

No one can do without some semblance of immortality, and even less will they deny themselves the right to seek it out in the form of this or that reputation, starting with the literary... Since death has come to be accepted by all as the absolute end, everyone writes.

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.

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

We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.