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

No one can keep his griefs in their prime; they use themselves up.

True confessions are written with tears only. But my tears would drown the world, as my inner fire would reduce it to ashes.

I have tried to protect myself against men, to react against their madness to discern its source; I have listened and I have seen--and I have been afraid of acting for the same motives or for any motive whatever, of believing in the same ghosts or in any other ghost, of letting myself be engulfed by the same intoxications or by some other... afraid, in short, of raving in common and of expiring in a horde of ecstasies.

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

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.

By what aberration has suicide, the only truly normal action, become the attribute of the flawed?