The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

My mission is to suffer for all those who suffer without knowing it. I must pay for them, expiate their unconsciousness, their luck to be ignorant of how unhappy they are.

What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.

Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.

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