In the long run one gets used to anything.

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery...

Nothing in life is worth,turning your back on,if you love it.

Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory….everything is forgotten, even a great love. That’s what’s sad about life, and also what’s wonderful about it. There is only a...

God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgement. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely,...

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.

I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea streaming like a wet wash. I like them, for...

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably...

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. “Everything is permitted” does not mean that nothing is forbidden.

Let us rejoice.

But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have...

Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.

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.

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.

The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify...

And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it...

Il choisirait de tout croire pour ne pas être réduit à tout nier.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

Já reparou que só a morte desperta nossos sentimentos? Como amamos os amigos que acabam de deixar-nos, não acha?! Como admiramos nossos mestres que já não falam mais, que estão com a boca cheia de...

Ah, this dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of what we are capable.

Sin duda, nada es más natural hoy día que ver a las gentes trabajar de la mañana a la noche y en seguida elegir, entre el café, el juego y la charla, el modo de...

How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: ‘A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That’s all I want of it.

False judges are held up in the world’s admiration and I alone know the true ones.

He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen – and that explains most human...

Don’t walk in front of me I may not follow:Don’t behind me I may not lead:Just walk beside me a be my friend.

On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible...

Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.

Beyond the curve of his days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity–happiness was human, eternity ordinary.

La lassitude est la fin des actes d’une vie machinale, mais elle inaugure en même temps le mouvement de la conscience. Elle l’éveille et elle provoque la suite. La suite, c’est le retour inconscient dans...

It is better to burn than to disappear.

With rebellion, awareness is born

The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter – these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence...

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.

Mother used to say that however miserable one is, there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.

The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is...

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.

ou nous ne sommes pas libres et Dieu tout-puissant est responsable du mal. Ou nous sommes libres et responsables mais Dieu n’est pas tout-puissant. Toutes les subtilités d’écoles n’ont rien ajouté ni soustrait au tranchant...

We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”[The Minotaur]

There is not love of life without despair about life.

It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.

Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else,...

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.

Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man’s awareness of it.

…we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who...

From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him his own heart.

Isn’t post-modernism really one big cover-up for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?

De opstand gaat niet verder dan het doden van mensen; de revolutie moet mensen èn beginselen vernietigen. Om deze reden kan men ook zeggen dat de geschiedenis nog geen revolutie gekend heeft; er kan er...