Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

The more we try to rest ourselves from our Egos, the deeper we sink into it.

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

To act is to anchor in an imminent future, so imminent it becomes almost tangible; to act is to feel you are consubstantial with that future.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

Truths begin by a conflict with the police - and end by calling them in.

Anyone who speaks in the name of others is always an imposter.

Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.

I lost my sleep, and this is the greatest tragedy that can befall someone. It is much worse than sitting in prison.

The limit of every pain is an even greater pain.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the Devil; unable to equal him in power, I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony, arbitrariness and caprice.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.