I don’t much believe in the happiness of animals, except when I want to use this conceit as a frame for highlighting a particular feeling. To be happy, it’s necessary to know that one’s happy. The only happiness we get from sleeping without dreaming is when we wake up and realize that we’ve slept without dreaming. Happiness is outside of happiness.

There’s no happiness without knowledge. But the knowledge of happiness brings unhappiness, because to know that you’re happy is to realize that you’re experiencing a happy moment and will soon have to leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything else. Not to know, on the other hand, is not to exist.

Only the absolute of Hegel managed to be two things at once, but in writing. Being and non-being do not mix and meld in the sensations and laws of life; they exclude one another, by a kind of reverse synthesis.

What to do? Isolate the moment like a thing, and be happy now, in the moment we’re feeling happiness, thinking of nothing but what we’re feeling and completely excluding everything else. Trap all thought in our sensation.....

That’s what I believe this afternoon. It’s not what I’ll believe tomorrow morning, because tomorrow morning I’ll be someone else. What kind of believer will I be tomorrow? I don’t know; I would already have to be there to know. Not even God eternal, in whom today I believe, could know – today or tomorrow – anything about me tomorrow. Because today I’m I, and tomorrow it’s possible that he’ll have never existed.