“I am still alive then. That may come in useful.”

Poets are the sense, philosophers­­ the intelligence­­ of humanity.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes off and I’m as intelligent as ever.

We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.

If I was dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

That desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.

I marshalled the words and opened my mouth, thinking I would hear them. But all I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended.

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

To have been always what I am – and so changed from what I was.

Nothing is more real than nothing.

What do we do now, now that we are happy?

For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late!

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

I would like to make a film to tell children “it’s good to be alive”.

The world is more alive at night; it’s like God isn’t looking.

I will not say that your mulberry trees are dead; but I am afraid they’re not alive.

Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Women make the world beautiful, they protect it and keep it alive.