“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, "What is hell?" I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

“I love, I can only love the one I've left behind, stained with my blood when, ungrateful wretch that I am, I extinguished myself and shot myself through the heart. But never, never have I ceased to love that one, and even on the night I parted from him I loved him perhaps more poignantly than ever. We can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love. I want and thirst this very minute to kiss , with tears streaming down my cheeks, this one and only I have left behind. I don't want and won't accept any other.”

“I want to suffer and be purified by suffering!”

“We degrade Providence too much by attributing our ideas to it out of annoyance at being unable to understand it.”

“I understand solidarity in sin among men; solidarity in retribution I also understand; but what solidarity in sin do little children have? ...And if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price.”

“After all, man may be fond not only ofwell-being. Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as much in his interest as well-being?”