“If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.”

I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.

I said to myself, ‘I want to die decently’.

In love, one and one are one.

Existence is an imperfection.

I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.

You are — your life, and nothing else.

I am not asking for sensational revelations, but I would like to sense the meaning of that minute, to feel it’s urgency.

It was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.

Existence is prior to essence.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.

It’s strange. I felt less lonely when I didn’t know you.

Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.

You’re lucky. I’m always conscious of myself —in my mind. Painfully conscious.

A madman’s ravings are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in relation to his madness.

What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

We often suffer more from our fears, than from the dangers of our situation.

Some sorts of truth are truer than others.

All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else.

Took me a while to realize that it’s only after breaking completely some parts of us completely fixes.

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.