... you can never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and mistress.

"I love mankind," he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."

Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: "Leave behind all hope, you who enter here."

I utter what you would not dare think

People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact.

I have in my own life merely carried to the extreme that which you have never ventured to carry even halfway ; and what's more, you've regarded your cowardice as prudence, and found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that, in fact, I may be even more "alive" than you are. Do take a closer look!

A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.