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Happiness

• Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.
• If I think that happiness is possible, I know all too well its hidden nature–and by what wretched paradox, instead of being an excess that would elevate us in dignity, it is a numbness we are only aware of afterward.
• Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
• The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.
• There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that’s the best they can hope for.
• Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
• To be happy, we must not be too concerned with what others think.
• Who would dare speak the word “happiness” in these tortured times? Yet millions today continue to seek happiness. These years have been for them only a prolonged postponement, at the end of which they hope to find that the possibility for happiness has been renewed. Who could blame them? And who could say that they are wrong? What would justice be without the chance for happiness? What purpose would freedom serve, if we had to live in misery?
• Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.
• Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.
• Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

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Meaning

• I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.
• You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

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Embracing life

• If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
• Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
• Let’s not beat around the bush; I love life — that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

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Passion

• In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths.

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Freedom

• Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.
• Can this be happiness, this terrifying freedom?
• Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
• I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.
• Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore, they do not believe in dying completely.
• The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
• The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
• Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself and dies of all others.
• A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.
• Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
• To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being.

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Free speech

• A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

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Work

• Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
• You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

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Great works

• All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.

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Truth and falsehood

• A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
• How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
• Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
• Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
• We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
• Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
• There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.

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Understanding

• In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
• I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.
• The greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept the unintelligibility of the world — and to pay attention to man.

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Knowledge

• The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

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Self-knowledge and acceptance

• At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
• To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

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Love

• I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
• It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
• Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
• We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
• When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.
• Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
• No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.
• The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
• There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.

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Friendship

• Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
• 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.
• Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship – never.
• How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
• He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don’t change character, men are dogs to one another.

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Compassion

• To grow old is to move from passion to compassion.

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Generosity

• You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.
• Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
• Real generosity toward the future consists in giving all to the present.

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Unity

• In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.
• Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.
• Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.

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Integrity

• I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.

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Choice

• Life is the sum of all your choices.
• Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

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Justice

• Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.
• Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
• I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
• We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.
• When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

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Culture

• Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

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Experience

• You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
• When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
• To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

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Beauty

• At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
• Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
• We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.
• We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink.
• Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world.

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Frugality

• Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

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Honesty

• Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

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Insight

• A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.

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Harmony

• But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

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Recognition

• Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I.

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Being assertive

• To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

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Making a difference

• Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
• In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality … we can no longer hope to save everything, but … we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.

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Courage

• Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people.
• Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

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Order

• There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

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Living in the present moment

• Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

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Perception

• Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

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Fate

• There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
• The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.
• A fate is not a punishment.
• Fate is not in man but around him.

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Acceptance

• The contradiction is this: man rejects the world as it is, without accepting the necessity of escaping it. In fact, men cling to the world and by far the majority do not want to abandon it.

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Grace

• So many men are deprived of grace. How can one live without grace? One has to try it and do what Christianity never did: be concerned with the damned.

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Duality

• There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

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Peace

• Peace is the only battle worth waging.
• There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
• Before the terrifying prospects now available to humanity, we see even more clearly that peace is the only goal worth struggling for. This is no longer a prayer but a demand to be made by all peoples to their governments — a demand to choose definitively between hell and reason.

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Deep feelings

• Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness or generosity. A universe — in other words a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.
• Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

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Charm

• Charm is a way of getting the answer ‘Yes’ without asking a clear question.

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Diversity

• Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity! And diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the work and of life.

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Logic

• It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
• There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.

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Principle

• To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
• The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.

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Virtue

• Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

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Ethics and morality

• A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
• All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
• All I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.

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Absurdity

• Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
• At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
• The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
• The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
• The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.
• Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.
• The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. “Everything is permitted” does not mean that nothing is forbidden.
• The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.

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Heartbreak

• Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

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Life as a struggle

• I don’t want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
• How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!
• If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
• It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched.

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Judgement

• People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

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Indifference

• Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
• Gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.

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Despair

• He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
• It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
• Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.
• There is not love of life without despair about life.

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Self-pity

• God put self-pity by the side of despair like the cure by the side of the disease.

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Lying

• Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

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Adversity and misfortune

• In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
• When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
• Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
• Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

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Fear

• Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

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Worrying what others think

• To be happy, we must not be too concerned with what others think.

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Idleness

• He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

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Evil

• To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
• Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

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Ignorance

• The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

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Violence

• No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
• Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.
• The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
• Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.
• Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case, it is someone else’s blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.
• On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. … the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.

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Ideology

• Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.

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Conformity

• Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

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Misery

• To correct a natural indifference, I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

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Suicide

• Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
• There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.
• What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
• Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

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Cruelty

• Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?

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Hatred

• Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred.

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Art

• A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
• A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
• Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda. On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lies the freedom of art.
• Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.
• If the world were clear, art would not exist.
• It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
• The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
• Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself and dies of all others.
• The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
• Art is the activity that exalts and denies simultaneously.
• Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.
• Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.
• The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.
• The artist reconstructs the world to his plan.

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Politics

• I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
• To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
• One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
• The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.

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Government

• All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
• By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

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Law

• Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
• To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

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Punishment

• For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists.
• After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
• A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge.
• Don’t let them tell us stories. Don’t let them say of the man sentenced to death “He is going to pay his debt to society,” but: “They are going to cut off his head.” It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye.
• God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
• What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?

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Revolution and rebellion

• Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
• All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
• Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
• Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
• What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
• Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
• In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.
• The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration for order.

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War

• We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives… inside ourselves.
• The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
• When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though the war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

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God

• Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
• I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.
• Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.
• We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
• God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.

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Death

• Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.
• Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood – never.
• Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore, they do not believe in dying completely.
• No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.
• Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.
• To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
• What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
• Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.

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Nature

• I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
• The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one’s head against a wall.

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Relationships

• Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future – and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.

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Wealth and money

• Having money is a way of being free of money.
• It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
• Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.

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Existence

• In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
• In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
• In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that’s all.

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Technology

• Our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.

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Writing

• A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters.
• The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.
• Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

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The ocean

• I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

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Autumn

• Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

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More thoughts

• Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
• All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
• All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
• An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
• Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
• Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
• Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.
• It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.
• Man is the only animal that refuses to be what he is.
• Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
• Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
• Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds — a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents.
• Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
• The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
• The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
• The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
• The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
• There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
• This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
• Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.
• We are all special cases.
• We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
• A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.
• We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
• Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory…Everything is forgotten, even great love.
• For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.
• I hope the dogs don’t bark tonight. I always think it’s mine.
• I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
• Martyrs must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood—never!
• The important thing isn’t the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.
• Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
• Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.

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• Some people talk in their sleep; lecturers talk while other people sleep.
• Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
• To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one’s landlady.

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