One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself.
How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?
Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.
I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.
To think the way you do, you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope. On both perhaps.
Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.
No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.
And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.
When I see a new face, something sets off an alarm bell inside me. ‘slow down! Danger!’ Even when the attraction is strongest, I am on my guard.
My dear friend, we mustn’t give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.
This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.
We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.
The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it.
You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You’re judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don’t like the sentence.
I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L’Illustration. Something desperate, you know.
They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.
There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.