For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.
Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting.
When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.
Whoever gives nothing, has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.
To remain a man in today’s world, one must have not only unfailing energy and unwavering intensity, one must also have a little luck.
One must place one’s principles in big things. For the small, graciousness will suffice.
Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.
Why must one love rarely to love well?
In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don’t dare speak of it directly.
True artists scorn nothing.
In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.
I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.
Everybody knows life isn’t worth living.
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose a future...
The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.
Death means nothing to men like me. It’s the event that proves them right.
I want to know if I can live with what I know, and only than.
Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.
Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.
I realized people would soon forget me once I was dead. I couldn’t even say that this was hard to stomach; really, there’s no idea to which one doesn’t get acclimatized in time.