In people's eyes I readPages of malice and sin.

The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau's Confessions has precisely this defect – he read it to his friends.

Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning.

I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate.

I was born, so that the whole world could be a spectatorOf my triumph or my doom.

There are two men in me--one lives in the full sense of the word, the other reasons and passes judgment on the first. The first will perhaps take leave of you and the world forever in an hour now; and the second . . . the second?

A strange thing, the human heart in general, and woman's heart in particular.