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

The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.

I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?

The truth is paradoxical to the extent of being exactly contrary to the usual perception.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.