“Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.”
“Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.”
“We derive our vitality from our store of madness.”
“To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.”
“Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.”
“To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.”
“A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.”
“There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.”
“No one can keep his grieves in their prime; they use themselves up.”
“Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.”
“What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?”
“If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.”
“Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.”
“Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness.”
“God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.”
“Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.”
“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.”
“Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.”
“The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.”
“It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
“Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.”
“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”
“One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.”
“A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect.”
“Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.”
“We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.”
“A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.”
“The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.”
“The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.”
“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.”