Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.
A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.
How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
You will always win if you make an effort, no matter how much. However, if you failed it means you were too lazy.
God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.
We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.
Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.
At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.
There is nothing abstract about pain. It is specific, it is real, and, when it is intense, it is world destroying.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
Tout re volutionnaire finit en oppresseur ou en he re tique. Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.
The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.
What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.
The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.
A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.
The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.
Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.
Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we'd never be done with it.
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.
And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.
If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent.
That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.3
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie' re ve? rite? . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.
A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.
One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.
The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.
I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.
In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.