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.

Truth is a suicide

The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

Psychoanalysis will be entirely discredited one of these days, no doubt about it. Which will not keep it from having destroyed our last vestiges of naïveté. After psychoanalysis, we can never again be innocent.

In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading it for? A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Dissect your motives deeper! You will find that no one has ever done anything wholly for others. All actions are self-directed, all service is self-serving, all love self-loving.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.