The mind's eye can nowhere find anything more dazzling or more dark than in man; it can fix itself upon nothing which is more awful, more complex, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.

He did not study God; he was dazzled by him.

There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.

But alas, if I have not maintained my victory, it is God's fault for not making man and the devil of equal strength.

The world of sleep has an existence of its own.

Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity.

...Though we chisel away as best we can at the mysterious block from which our life is made, the black vein of destiny continually reappears.