"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."
"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."
"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
"Live to the point of tears."
"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question."
"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"
"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."
"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.'"
"There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for."
"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman."
"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."
"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."
"Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day."
"I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist."
"When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune."
"You can't create experience, you undergo it."
"It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners."
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."
"But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself."
"I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world."
"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."
"Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."
"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."
"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."
"Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart."
"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
"A loveless world is a dead world."
"She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth."
"I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God."
"The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth."
"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself up to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."
"Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth."
"What is a rebel? A man who says no."
"I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray."
"Life can be magnificent and overwhelming - that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. "
"She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her."
"We are all special cases."
"We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others."
"Peace is the only battle worth waging."
"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards."
"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable."
"Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people's anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble - yes, gamble - with a whole part of their life and their so called 'vital interests'."
"Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable."
"The need to be right - the sign of a vulgar mind."
"If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it."
"I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't."
"People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves."
"There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined."
"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."
"The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."
"Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends!"
"I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold."
"Integrity has no need of rules."
"Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason."
"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool."
"...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself."
"We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us."
"Art and revolt will die only with the last man."
"And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from."
"In different degrees, in every part of the town, men and women had been yearning for a reunion, not of the same kind for all, but for all alike ruled out. Most of them had longed intensely for an absent one, for the warmth of a body, for love, or merely a life that habit had endeared. 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, fewer these... had desired a reunion with something they couldn't have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on Earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace."
"There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive."
"What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly."
"What I'm sure of is that you can't be happy without money. That's all. I don't like superficiality and I don't like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I've noticed is that there's a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain 'superior beings' who think that money isn't necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly."
"Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."
"What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying."
"You always get exaggerated notions about things you don't know anything about."
"...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves."
"It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end."
"All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out."
"We have to live and let live in order to create what we are."
"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face."
"Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate."
"Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity."
"It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy."
"Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic."
"The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits."
"At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it. I would have waited for the birds to fly by or the clouds to mingle, just as here I waited to see my lawyer's ties and just as, in another world, I used to wait patiently until Saturday to hold Marie's body in my arms. Now, as I think back on it, I wasn't in a hollow tree trunk. There were others worse off than me. Anyway, it was one of mother's ideas and she often repeated it, that after awhile you could get used to anything."
"There is not love of life without despair about life."
"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."
"Nothing in life is worth,<br />
to turn your back on,<br />
if you love it."
"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."
"My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love."
"Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism."
"The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits."
"I had been right I was still right I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing and I had done another. And so?"
"I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one."
"I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still had any meaning for me."
"Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world."
"After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason."
"For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering?"
"Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him."
"Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football."
"All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door."
"I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness."
"Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments."
"I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing."
Albert Camus