A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for...

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could...

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...

Pregunta: ,qué hacer para no perder el tiempo?Respuesta: sentirlo en toda su lentitud. Medios: pasarse los días en la antesala de un dentista en una silla inconfortable; vivir el domingo en el balcón, por la...

There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not...

Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and boats. Others,...

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

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.

I don’t want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

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....

Les idées sont le contraire de la pensée.

Le suicide est une solution à l’absurde.

The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.

Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.

The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society.

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.