"My practicality consists in this: in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall … that is my strength, my only strength."

"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

"What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be."

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."

"I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die."