Quotes
In relation to any act of life, the mind acts as a killjoy.
No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive.
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
The more you live, the less useful it seems to have lived.
For a long time — always, in fact — I have known that life here on earth is not what I needed and that I wasn't able to deal with it; for this reason and for this reason alone, I have acquired a touch of spiritual pride, so that my existence seems to me the degradation and the erosion of a psalm.
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
Why do you lack the strength to escape the obligation to breathe?
To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.
Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.
Born in a prison, with burdens on our shoulders and our thoughts, we could not reach the end of a single day if the possibilities of ending it all did not incite us to begin the next day all over again.
Death is too exact; it has all the reasons on its side. Mysterious for our instincts, it takes shape, to our reflection, limpid, without glamor, and without the false lures of the unknown. By dint of accumulating non-mysteries and monopolizing non-meanings, life inspires more dread than death: it is life which is the Great Unknown.
How swiftly life passes here below! The first quarter of it is gone before we know how to use it; the last quarter finds us incapable of enjoying life. At first we do not know how to live; and when we know how to live it is too late. In the interval between these two useless extremes we waste three-fourths of our time sleeping, working, sorrowing, enduring restraint and every kind of suffering. Life is short, not so much because of the short time it lasts, but because we are allowed scarcely any time to enjoy it.
