You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.

Nothing comes at all -- never anything. And I cannot accustom myself to that. It is this monotony, this absolute fixity in life, that is the hardest thing for me to endure. I should like to go away from here. Go away? But where and how? I do not know, and I stay.

The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden…Passions, greed, hatred, and lies social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.

Desire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual ideal of hell and its horror.

Great ladies ... are like the best sauces -- it is better not to know how they are made.

Murder is born of love, and love attains the greatest intensity in murder.

While all is new, all is beautiful. That is a well-known song. Yes, and the next day the air changes into another one equally well known.

The greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.

While I was an honorable man in her eyes, she did not love me. But the minute she understood what I was, when she breathed the true and foul odor of my soul, love was born in her – for she does love me! Well, well! There is nothing real, then, except evil.

Nature’s constantly screaming with all its shapes and scents: love each other! Love each other! Do as the flowers. There’s only love.