By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

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.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

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

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.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

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

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

If you cannot be open-minded, then you do not possess your ideas, your ideas possess you.

Scars speak for you. They say you're strong, and you've survived something that might have killed others.

All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

My problem is that I never get through the whole book. I skim through this one, that one, and then the other one.

Luck always plays a part for everyone, whether they want to admit it or not. I was very lucky, and I know it.

If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.

A modest woman has good children.

I've always figured that if God wanted us to go to church a lot He'd have given us bigger behinds to sit on and smaller heads to think with.

Nine-tenths of discipline is having the patience to do things right.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies - it is the first law of nature.