We would not be interested in human beings if we did not have the hope of someday meeting someone worse off than ourselves.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

We define only out of despair, we must have a formula... to give a facade tot he void.

Not one moment when I have not been conscious of being outside Paradise.