- There is something great and terrible about suicide.

- An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

- Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

- Death unites as well as separates; it silences all paltry feeling.

- Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

- Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Honoré de Balzac

Sooner or later
we all make the
little flowers grow ...

- Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

- Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

- My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

- Life is nothing; death, everything. Yet there is nothing which is death, independent of life. It is precisely this absence of autonomous, distinct reality which makes death universal; it has no realm of its own, it is omnipresent, like everything which lacks identity, limit, and bearing: an indecent infinitude.

- Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough.

- To stretch out in a field, to smell the earth and tell yourself it is the end as well as the hope of our dejections, that it would be futile to search for anything better to rest on, to dissolve into.

- As long as I live I shall not allow myself to forget that I shall die; I am waiting for death so that I can forget about it.

For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it.
For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it.
For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it.

Omnium rerum principia parva sunt.
The beginnings of all things are small.

Ille dolet vere, qui sine teste dolet.
He mourns honestly who mourns without witnesses.

Est queadam fiere voluptas.
There is a certain pleasure in weeping.


Lugete, O Veneres Cupidinesque.
Mourn, O Cupids and Venuses.