Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.
There is only one thing worse than boredom, and that is the fear of boredom.
What strangely enchanted tunes gush forth during those sleepless nights!
In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.
The only way of enduring one disaster after the next is to love the very idea of disaster: if we succeed, there are no further surprises, we are superior to whatever occurs, we are invincible victims.
A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society
So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.
The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
You cannot protect your solitude if you cannot make yourself odious.
Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.
That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.
Ideas should be neutral. But man animates them with his passions and folly. Impure and turned into beliefs, they take on the appearance of reality. The passage from logic is consummated. Thus are born ideologies, doctrines, and bloody farce.
History proves nothing because it contains everything.
Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.
Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.
What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?
No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.
Does our ferocity not derive from the fact that our instincts are all too interested in other people? If we attended more to ourselves and became the center, the object of our murderous inclinations, the sum of our intolerances would diminish.
Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately, it is within no one's reach.