I want to rethink 'surrender' as an active verb.

I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force - a wild pain and decay - also accompanies everything.

Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.

Sartre’s...concept of hell in his 1944 play No Exit is tinglingly prophetic of our current predicament. The play is about three freshly dead strangers who have just arrived in a windowless room in hell. One of the first things they all notice about hell is the absence of mirrors...and they become each other’s looking-glasses. The play’s conception of damnation, then, is a life in which your self-image is forged entirely in public. Your “I” only exists because someone says “You.” Garcin understands that “there’s no need for red-hot pokers” in this place, because both the scrutiny of his roommates and his terrible reliance on them is the torture. “Hell is — other people!”

No Exit [is] a predictive text, a warning to the coming digital generations about living under the unblinking gaze of others. Sartre’s famous line is a recognition that the self–other balance can never be adequately struck as long as the "others" are constantly "watching." Balance depends on our ability to retreat into a truly private place, released from the demands and appellations of our devices.

Disjunction from the world through suffering leads to excessive interiorization and, paradoxically, to such a high level of consciousness that the world, with all its splendors and glooms, becomes exterior and transcendent. Thus deeply sundered from the world, so irredeemably lonely, how can we forget anything? We want to forget only what made us suffer. However, through some cruel and paradoxical twist, memories vanish when we want to remember but fix themselves permanently in the mind when we want to forget.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

One is dead in one’s lifetime itself; multiple deaths accompany us, ghosts that are not necessarily hostile, and yet others, not dead enough, not dead long enough to make a corpse. At any rate, we have all already been dead before living, and we came out of it alive. We were dead before and we shall be dead again after. Death and life can reverse themselves from this standpoint. And this implies another presence of death to life, because it – not simply an indeterminate nothingness, but a determinate, personal death – was there before and it does not cease to exist and to make itself felt with birth. This connects up with the genetic process of apoptosis, in which the two opposing processes of life and death begin at the same time. In which death is not the gradual exhaustion of life: they are autonomous processes – complicit in a way, parallel and indissociable.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever…

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. There is "not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot”.

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

All love is conditional, the idea of unconditional love is unrealistic.

If we attempt to take in at a glance the whole world of humanity, we see everywhere a restless struggle, a vast contest for life and existence, with the fullest exertion of bodily and mental powers, in the face of dangers and evils of every kind which threaten and strike at any moment. If we then consider the reward for all this, namely existence and life itself, we find some intervals of painless existence which are at once attacked by boredom and rapidly brought to an end by a new affliction. Life...is kept in motion merely by want and illusion. But as soon as this comes to a standstill, the utter barrenness and emptiness of existence become apparent.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

Do you still perform autopsies on conversations you've had lives ago?

It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings;
coming in out of the wind.

What we've called universal values, what we have called truth, has always only ever been the personal expressions of those who promoted them.

God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when they are happy: they have a way of embracing happiness as if they wanted to crush and suffocate it, from jealousy: alas, they know only too well that it will flee.