In our society, any man who doesn’t cry at his mother’s funeral is liable to be condemned to death.
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world.
Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.
We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink.
To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.
Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.
This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.
Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.
So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.
To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge.
Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.
Without freedom there is no art.
The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.
Yes, everything is simple. It’s people who complicate things.
One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.
It is not true that the heart wears out – but the body creates this illusion.
In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.
If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.