Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.

The line crystallizes a classical paradox of sovereignty: external dominion does not guarantee inner mastery. Even a figure imagined as “master of the universe” can be undone by passions, scruples, or conscience—forces that make the self a kind of internal opposition. Calling oneself “the only rebel” against one’s “absolute power” suggests that the most intractable resistance to authority is not political but psychological: the will divided against itself. Read in a Corneillean key, it evokes the tension between grandeur (heroic power, public role) and the private realm of desire and moral conflict, where autonomy is hardest won.