Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some.

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems

Man needs to suffer. When he does not have real griefs he creates them. Griefs purify and prepare him.

We suffer more in imagination than in reality.

We suffer more in imagination than in reality.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality

Life is not, and death is a dream. Suffering has invented them both as self-justification. Man alone is torn between an unreality and an illusion.

Why wilt thou add to all the griefs I suffer Imaginary ills, and fancy'd tortures?

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

An anxious man constructs his terrors, then installs himself within them: a stay-at-home in a yawning chasm.

Creating difficulties for himself for the pleasure of resolving them is a strange human mania.

...for one cannot enter an image unless one makes oneself imaginary

He knew that in so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.