Caligula and Three Other Plays

At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.

Death will be my supreme protest against a world of tears and blood.

Loneliness! What do you know of it? Only the loneliness of poets and weaklings. You prate of loneliness, but you don’t realize that one is never alone. Always we are attended by the same load of the future and the past. Those we have killed are always with us. But they are no great trouble. It’s those we have loved, those who loved us and whom we did not love; regrets, desires, bitterness and sweetness, whores and gods, the gang celestial! Always, always with us!

Crime, too, means solitude, even if a thousand people join together to commit it.

It's easy, ever so much easier, to die of one's inner conflicts than to live with them.

STEPAN: Innocence? Yes, maybe I know what that means. But I prefer to shut my eyes to it—and to shut others’ eyes to it, for the time being—so that one day it may have a world-wide meaning. KALIAYEV: Well, you must feel very sure that day is coming if you repudiate everything that makes life worth living today, on its account. STEPAN: I am certain that that day is coming. KALIAYEV: No, you can’t be as sure as that.… Before it can be known which of us, you or I, is right, perhaps three generations will have to be sacrificed; there will have been bloody wars, and no less bloody revolutions. And by the time that all this blood has dried off the earth, you and I will long since have turned to dust.

Aren’t you sentient human beings? Or are you living like animals for the moment only? In that case by all means indulge in charity and cure each petty suffering that meets your eye; but don’t meddle with the revolution, for its task is to cure all sufferings present and to come.

I like, and need, to feel secure. So do most men. They resent living in a world where the most preposterous fancy may at any moment become a reality, and the absurd transfix their lives, like a dagger in the heart. I feel as they do; I refuse to live in a topsy-turvy world.