“Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.”

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.

Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?

Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.

They spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.

If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.

When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.

My heart’s in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.

Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.

Betrayal is beautiful.

Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.

I’m kind because I know how cruel feels.

Heaven help the man who kicks the man who has to crawl.

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.

Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little.

Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.

It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.

Pity is cruel. Pity destroys.