Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.
Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")
Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.
This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
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 it is.
Art does not tolerate reason.
The truth, as the light, makes blind.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
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.
Fate is not in man but around him
Morality, when formal, devours.
I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.
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.
A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don't know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.
The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.
Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
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