There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.

You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

Every profound dissatisfaction is of a religious nature: our failures derive from our incapacity to conceive of paradise and to aspire to it, as our discomforts from the fragility of our relations with the absolute.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

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.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.