“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”

It is disgusting – Why must we have bodies?

Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

Hell is – other people!

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.

We are our choices.

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

I never could bear the idea of anyone’s expecting something from me. It always made me want to do the opposite.

I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.

There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.

He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.

Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.

There is no escape – man drags man down, or man lifts man up.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

Whenever your life touches mine, you make me stronger of weaker… there is no escape… people drag others or lift others up.

The discovery there is no god is a great relief, because if there were, it would be like living in a celestial North Korea if there was one. You would never be able to escape.

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

Take me from this wasteland, for I have longed for an escape like a bird that craves the wilderness, from every corner of his cage.

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.