I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

There is no more futile punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.

Mistakes are joyful, truth infernal.

A régime [Nazism] which invented a biological foreign policy was obviously acting against its own best interests. But at least it obeyed its own particular logic.

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.

Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.