Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.
I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.
You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us.
Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.
Once one’s up against it, the precise manner of one’s death has obviously small importance.
In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.
The important thing isn’t the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.
Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.
There are plagues, and there are victims, and it’s the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.
I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.
Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself.
This is the century of fear.
False judges are held up in the world’s admiration and I alone know the true ones.
We are not certain, we are never certain.
Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.
The day of my arrest I was first put in a room where there were already several other prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked what I was in for. I said I’d killed an Arab and they were all silent.
Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.
It’s better to bet on this life than on the next.
Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.