Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when belief withers.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

I try--without success--to stop finding reasons for vanity in anything. When I happen to manage it nonetheless, I feel that I no longer belong to the mortal gang. I am above everything then, above the gods themselves. Perhaps that is what death is: a sensation of great, of extreme superiority.

My mission is to kill time, and time's to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.

If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.

If just once you were depressed for no reason, you have been so all your life without knowing.