Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have .. the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality .. which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.

We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.

When you say you are in love with humanity, you are well satisfied with yourself.

THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.

Phantoms in general are nothing more than trifling disorders of the spirit; images we cannot contain within the bounds of sleep.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

Those who understood, in fact, say: 'I mustn't do this, I mustn't do that,' so as not to commit some stupidity or other! Splendid! But at a certain point we realize that all life is stupidity; so tell me yourself what it means never to have done anything foolish. At the very least it means you have never lived.