Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me.
The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.
When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.
Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.
It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words, to silence.
For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.
One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn’t even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.
Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.
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.
Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.
Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.
I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.
I don’t want to represent man as he is, but only as he might be.
Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.
It is immoral not to tell.
There is no frontier between being and appearing.
We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.
A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.
On good days, if you trust life, life has to answer you.