I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

The great courage is to stare as squarely at the light as at death.

At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.

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

It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything- by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.