To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

At this very moment, I am suffering—as we say in French, j’ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.

Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Tolerance - the function of an extinguished ardor - tolerance cannot seduce the young.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.