Great Throughts Treasury

"Sperm is a bandit in its pure state."

"Some have misfortunes; others, obsessions. Which are worse off?"

"Society : an inferno of saviors."

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

"Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth."

"That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit."

"Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have."

"The "west" - what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?"

"The appetite for torment is for some what the lure of gain is for others."

"The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost."

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

"The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those devoured by the flames within them?"

"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."

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

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

"The feeling of being the thousand years behind, or ahead, of the others, of belonging to the beginnings or to the end of humanity..."

"The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself."

"The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men."

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

"The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others."

"The limit of every pain is an even greater pain."

"The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous."

"The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims."

"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 sole means of protecting your solitude is to offend everyone, beginning with those you love."

"The problem of responsibility would have a meaning only if we had been consulted before our birth and had consented to be precisely who we are."

"The west - what curse has fallen upon it that at the term of its trajectory it produces only these businessmen, these shopkeepers, these racketeers with their blank stares and atrophied smiles... is it with such vermin as this that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?"

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

"The Universal view melts things into a blur."

"There is no limit to suffering."

"There are eyes which can no longer learn anything from the sun, and souls afflicted by nights from which they will never recover."

"There was a time when time did not yet exist... The rejection of birth is nothing but the nostalgia for this time before time."

"There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be."

"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."

"To act is to anchor in the imminent future."

"To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world."

"To be modern is to tinker with the incurable."

"To be human is no solution, any more than ceasing to be so."

"To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring."

"To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!"

"To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer. As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being."

"To have committed every crime but that of being a father."

"To live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself."

"To foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within."

"To live is to lose ground."

"To live... in any sense of the word... is to reject others; to accept them, one must renounce, do oneself violence."

"To think is to take a cunning revenge in which we camouflage our baseness and conceal our lower instincts."

"To venture upon an undertaking of any kind, even the most insignificant, is to sacrifice to envy."

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

"To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten."