To Foreswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

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.

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

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.