Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.

The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.

The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

By giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men.