How difficult it is to live when one feels that the judgment of many millenniums is around one and against one.

It is regrettable that a Dostoyevsky did not live near this most interesting of all decadents (Jesus Christ) - I mean someone who would have known how to sense the very stirring charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the sickly, and the childlike.

Every habit makes our hand more witty and our wit less handy.

The soul must have its chosen sewers to carry away its ordure. This function is performed by persons, relationships, professions, the fatherland, the world, or finally, for the really arrogant - I mean our modern pessimists - by the Good God himself.

But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.

Sins are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be sinning.

Oh great star! What would your happiness be if you did not have us to shine for?