“…to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing…”

National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Context: It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; that constitute his ideal audience and his better self. To this congress the poet speaks not of peculiar and personal things, but of what in himself is most common, most anonymous, most fundamental, most true of all men. And he speaks not in private grunts and mutterings but in the public language of the dictionary, of literary tradition, and of the street. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the products something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

La plus grande chose du monde, c'est de savoir être à soi.
Book I, Ch. 39
Essais (1595), Book I
Source: The Complete Essays

trans. Michael Chase (1995), p. 90
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)

Quoted, Tender is the Night (1934)

Ibid., p. 265
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Todo o prazer é um vício, porque buscar o prazer é o que todos fazem na vida, e o único vício negro é fazer o que toda a gente faz.

Canto VI, lines 107–108 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Inferno

Savoir se libérer n'est rien; l'ardu, c'est savoir être libre.
The Immoralist, Chapter 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=MPmRAAAAIAAJ&q=%22Savoir+se+lib%C3%A9rer+n'est+rien+l'ardu+c'est+savoir+%C3%AAtre+libre%22&jtp=17#v=onepage (1902)
The Immoralist (1902)

Cronenberg: An intellectual with ominous powers http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/arts/19iht-dupont.html (May 19, 2006)