You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.

The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.

It is human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it, it is the agitation of all menthat alone determines revolutionary mental forms, in opposition to bourgeois mental forms.

Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit; to become delightful, happiness must be tainted with poison.

The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.

How cruel my suffering is,—no one is more talkative than I am!

The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.