One should never spurn a penitent criminal: in his despair he may become twice as much a criminal as before.

What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.

Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others.

And I, as I lived, in an alien landWill die a slave and an orphan.

Passions are merely ideas in their initial stage.

Afraid of decision, I buried my finer feelings in the depths of my heart and they died there.

My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason.