1. "A decadent civilization compromises with its disease, cherishes the virus infecting it, loses its self-respect."
2. "Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again."
3. “Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there."
4. "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."
5. "Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh."
6. "Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves."
7. "Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish."
8. "Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation."
9. "Fear can supplant our real problems only to the extent --unwilling either to assimilate or to exhaust it --we perpetuate it within ourselves like a temptation and enthrone it at the very heart of our solitude."
10. "If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot."
11. “It is by undermining the idea of reason, of order, of harmony, that we gain consciousness of ourselves.”
12. "No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it."
13. "One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other."
14. “Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.”
15. "Reason is a whore, surviving by simulation, versatility, and shamelessness."
16. "Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history."
17. "Sperm is a bandit in its pure state."
18. “The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live -- moreover, the only one.”
19. "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."
20. "The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself."
21. "There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be."
22. "Those who believe in their truth -- the only ones whose imprint is retained by the memory of men -- leave the earth behind them strewn with corpses. Religions number in their ledgers more murders than the bloodiest tyrannies account for, and those whom humanity has called divine far surpass the most conscientious murderers in their thirst for slaughter."
23. "To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring."
24. "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."
25. “To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.”
26. "We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves."
27. “What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?”
