When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, "What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act." And they do calm down.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

One must live with all, e'en if life be hell: Crime makes shame, not monetary stricture

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.

Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.

Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music.

Money is not the sole or most powerful motivation for many people. A higher and tougher test is to look back and see how you've made the world a better place.

It is no use lying to one's self.

I wish my name was Tom Kite.

You've got the sun, you've got the moon, and you've got the Rolling Stones.

I tell ye true, liberty is the best of all things; never live beneath the noose of a servile halter.