Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure.
Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.
When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking.
Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.
How can I, who was not able to retain my own past, hope to save that of another?
I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati's.
I admire [Samuel] Beckett, but I am totally against him. He seeks no improvement.
There is no book of mine that I reject. That does not mean that I find them good.
It is the same: a chosen one is a man whom God's finger crushes against the wall.
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Once freedom lights its beacon in man's heart, the gods are powerless against him.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.
I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.
What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.
If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.
Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.
Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.
it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.
So long as one believes in God, one has the right to do the Good in order to be moral.
I can always choose, but I ought to know that if I do not choose, I am still choosing.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
There is no salvation anywhere. The idea of salvation implies the idea of an absolute.
That is exactly the writer's problem. What does literature stand for in a hungry world?
It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.
Life gave me everything I asked If all I asked was not a great deal, that's my problem!
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
Intellectuals cannot be good revolutionaries; they are just good enough to be assassins.
Besides one should not believe that the people only want reading that is easy to absorb.
Once liberty has exploded in the soul of a man, the gods can do nothing against that man.
One should commit no stupidity twice, the variety of choice is, in the end, large enough.
Thus it amounts to the same thing whether one gets drunk alone or is a leader of nations.
I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
A man is involved in life, leaves his impress on it, and outside of that there is nothing.
We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.
I think [Alain Robbe-Grillet] a good writer, but he speaks to the comfortable bourgeoisie.
He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.
I receive letters from workers, from secretaries. . . . They are the most interesting ones.
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.
Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
When the rich [and politically powerful] make war, it's the poor [and politically weak] who die.
Our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind.
Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.
Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.
This is the basis for the joy of love when there is joy; we feel that our existence is justified.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.