One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

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.

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

God - a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.

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

Jealousy - that jumble of secret worship and ostensible aversion.

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.

Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.

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

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

We interest others by the misfortune we spread around us.

We are afraid of the enormity of the possible.

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

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

Under each formula lies a corpse.

Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

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

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

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

The Universal view melts things into a blur.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

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

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

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

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself.

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

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

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.

Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown.

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

The fear of being deceived is the vulgar version of the quest for Truth.

I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.

Word - that invisible dagger.