"From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes “responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.” It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, “the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?"

"I suffer from a frightful disease of the mind. My thought abandons me at all stages. From the simple act of thinking to the external act of its materialization in words. Words, forms of phrases, inner directions of thinking, simple reactions of the mind—I am in constant pursuit of my intellectual being. Hence, whenever I can seize upon a form, however imperfect it may be, I hold it fast, lest I lost the entire thought. I am beneath myself, I know it, it makes me suffer, but I accept the fact in the fear of not dying entirely."

"My painting is not violent, it’s life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death."

"People speak sometimes about the ‘animal’ cruelty of man. But that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals, no animal could ever be so cruel as man, so artfully, so artistically cruel."

"No one works? No one suffers?”
“Yes, millions of men.”
“Then that’s the common people."

"Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter."

"I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this—I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain."

"Suicide is no more than the fabulous and distant conquest of clear-thinking men.

I have no idea what things really are, no idea of any human state; nothing of this world turns for me, nothing turns in me. Being alive, I suffer horribly. I fail to reach any existing state. And most certainly I died long ago; my suicide has already taken place."

"Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough."

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain."

"Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and always has been one of the principle appetites of the soul."

"

You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief?…

We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.

"