Let us not be needlessly bitter: certain failures are sometimes fruitful.

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.

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

I do not want to see BP nickel and diming these businesses that are having a tough time.

What is pity but the vice of kindness.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.

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.