The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

Au milieu de l’hiver, j’ai découvert en moi un invincible été.

Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it...

Don’t let them tell us stories

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. ‘Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling...

Under the fatal lighting of that destiny, its uselessness becomes evident. No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.

In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

So we are steaming along without any landmark; we can’t gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It’s not navigation but dreaming.

On entendait alors les véhicules cahoter encore dans la nuit d’été, avec leur chargement de fleurs et de morts.

Live to the point of tears.

To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.

And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.

But a man’s beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do. And what is that compared to the magnificent uselessness of a woman’s face? Mersault was aware of this now, delighting...

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, in other words to silence.

As he himself said, “I will prove it to you, gentlemen, and i will prove it in two ways. First in the blinding clarity of the facts, and second, in the dim light cast by...

To create is to live twice.

I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day.

I rebel; therefore I exist.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

There’s the risk of being loved…and that would keep me from being happy.

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.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness...

In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.

The mind, when it reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions. This is where suicide and the reply stand.

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.

If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.

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

J’écoutais mon cœur. Je ne pouvais imaginer que ce bruit qui m’accompagnait depuis si longtemps pût jamais cesser.

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same...

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.

I know positively… that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest...

We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right...

Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or...

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead...

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn’t capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.

Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.

Do you believe in God, doctor?”No – but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I’ve long ceased finding that original.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it.

He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and...

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence

People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that’s all. Later on, when you’re old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That’s all...