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.
When the body is sad, the heart languishes.
One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.
Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement. Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.
It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'
Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
Je puis nier une chose sans me croire obligé de la salir ou de retirer aux autres le droit d'y croire.
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. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Liberty is the right not to lie.
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.
After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss
It is easy to shield the outer body from poisoned arrows, but it is impossible to shield the mind from the poisoned darts that originate within itself. Greed, anger, foolishness and the infatuations of egoism - these four poisoned darts originate within the mind and infect it with deadly poison.
Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.
An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.
I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.
If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?
Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
In order to exist, man must rebel.
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