In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.
Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.
Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.
Art and revolt will die only with the last man.
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.
No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.
No ends, simply means.
The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.
The mistake that men make is that they do not believe in theater. Otherwise, they would know that every man is allowed to play thecelestial tragedies and to become god. All he has to do is harden his heart.
If the world were clear, art would not exist.
... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.
If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.
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 repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.
To lose the touch of flowers and women's hands is the supreme separation.
There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
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 frontier between being and appearing.
I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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