To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.

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