"Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated, can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date on which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not to be encountered in private life."

"The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy."

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question."

"N'attendez pas le Jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours."

"For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style."

"Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."

"God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves."

"Let's not beat around the bush; I love life — that's my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life."

"Martyrs must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood—never!"

"Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came the human beings, they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate – for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself."

"In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all."

"This is the truth," we say. "You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right."

"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."

"There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it."

"La vraie générosité envers l'avenir consiste à tout donner au présent."

"L'homme enfin n'est pas entièrement coupable — il n'a pas commencé l'histoire — ni tout à fait innocent, puisqu'il la continue."

"Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature."

"No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession."

"The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it."

"In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe."

"Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world."

"The artist reconstructs the world to his plan."

"Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously. "No artist tolerates reality," says Nietzsche."

"A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously."

"The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall."

"A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists."

"Alyosha can, in fact, treat Ivan with compassion as a "real simpleton." The latter only made an attempt at self-control and failed. Others will appear, with more serious intentions, who, on the basis of the same despairing nihilism, will insist on ruling the world. These are the Grand Inquisitors who imprison Christ and come to tell Him that His method is not correct, that universal happiness cannot be achieved by the immediate freedom of choosing between good and evil, but by the domination and unification of the world. The first step is to conquer and rule. The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth, but it will be ruled over by men — a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Caesars, because they were the first to understand — and later, with time, by all men. The unity of all creation will be achieved by every possible means, since everything is permitted. The Grand Inquisitor is old and tired, for the knowledge he possesses is bitter. He knows that men are lazy rather than cowardly and that they prefer peace and death to the liberty of discerning between good and evil. He has pity, a cold pity, for the silent prisoner whom history endlessly deceives. He urges him to speak, to recognize his misdeeds, and, in one sense, to approve the actions of the Inquisitors and of the Caesars. But the prisoner does not speak."

"Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil."

"Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred."

"The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order."

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."

"Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others."

"I rebel — therefore we exist."

"In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time."

"Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated."

"Avoir de l'argent c'est se libérer de l'argent."

"Seulement, il faut du temps pour être heureux. Beaucoup de temps. Le bonheur lui aussi est une longue patience."

"The direction of the world overwhelms me at this time. In the long run, all the continents (yellow, black and brown) will spill over onto Old Europe. They are hundreds and hundreds of millions. They are hungry and they are not afraid to die. We no longer know how to die or how to kill. We could preach, but Europe believes in nothing. So, we must wait for the year 1000 or a miracle. For my part, I find it harder and harder to live before a wall."

"If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

"Ce que, finalement, je sais de plus sûr sur la morale et les obligations des hommes, c'est au football que je le dois."

"Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower."

"Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it."

"Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die."

"Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful."

"There is not love of life without despair about life."

"A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object."

"With rebellion, awareness is born."

"Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years. But for this lesson to get through and convince those in the West who shut their eyes and ears, it was necessary, and it can be no comfort to us, for the people of Hungary to shed so much blood which is already drying in our memories. In Europe's isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them. It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices."

"O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer."

"One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing."