The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others.

People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other.

All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.

Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world, a world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it's only feigned.

After all, there is nothing but failure.

We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.

What line separates the lawful wartime targeting of an enemy combatant from the extrajudicial murder of a man suspected, but not convicted, of wrongdoing? (p8)

There is no such thing as a good call at 7 AM. It's been my experience that all calls between the hours of 11 PM and 9 AM are disaster calls.

The orchestral or symphonic music never interested me.

What a strange joy it was to talk, to fish gleefully into the past and fling its fragments about us, with the unfailing aroma of pleasantness that pasts always seem to possess!

It won't take long before I explode with pent-up rage.

Life is beautiful and living is pain.

When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.

I mean, it's so normal for everybody to have a huge ego, it's great. It's great. Otherwise, everybody would act like Bono, you know, really big.

Praise has different effects, according to the mind it meets with; it makes a wise man modest, but a fool more arrogant, turning his weak brain giddy.

Education is to learning as tour groups are to adventure.