Ironic philosophies produce passionate works.

True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject.

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

And real nobility (that of the heart) is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.