... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.

There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.

I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that I finally obey.