We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven’t been cut off.
Every thought derives from a thwarted sensation.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
I have no nationality – the best possible status for an intellectual.
Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.
The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
Who Rebels? Who rises in arms? Rarely the slave, but almost always the oppressor turned slave.
Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.
My mission is to kill time, and time’s to kill me in its turn. How comfortable one is among murderers.
In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.
What pride to discover that nothing belongs to you – what a revelation.
Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it.
A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation’s paradise and its tomb.
Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.
Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.