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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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