Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
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")
Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
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.
To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.
Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.
I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.
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.
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
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.
A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.
It is better to burn than to disappear.
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.
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
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.
How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?
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.
You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.
Morality, when formal, devours.
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