Death is what has been given most precious to man. That is why the supreme impiety is to make bad use of it. To die badly. To kill badly. (But how can one escape both suicide and murder?) After death, love. An analogous problem: neither bad enjoyment nor bad privation. War and Eros are the two sources of illusion and falsehood among men. Their mixture is the greatest impurity. To strive to substitute increasingly in the world effective non-violence for violence. Non-violence is good only if it is effective. Thus, the question of the young man to Gandhi concerning his sister. The answer should be: use force, unless you are such that you can defend her, with an equal probability of success, without violence. Unless you possess a radiance whose energy (that is, whose possible efficacy, in the most material sense) is equal to that contained in your muscles. To strive to become such that one can be non-violent. This also depends on the adversary. The cause of wars: each man, each human group, feels itself rightly the legitimate master and possessor of the universe. But this possession is poorly understood, for want of knowing that access to it — insofar as it is possible for man on earth — passes, for each person, through his own body.
Alexander is to a peasant landowner what Don Juan is to a happy husband. War. To keep intact within oneself the love of life; never to inflict death without accepting it for oneself. In the case where the life of X... were linked to one's own to the point that the two deaths must be simultaneous, would one still wish him to die? If body and soul in their entirety aspire to life and yet, without lying, one can answer yes, then one has the right to kill.