I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

The more I produce, the less I am certain. On the road along which the artist walks, night falls ever more densely. Finally, he dies blind.

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man’s courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.

If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.