It is terrifying to see how easily, in certain people, all dignity collapses. Yet when you think about it, this is quite normal since they only maintain this dignity by constantly striving against their own nature.
Suffering gives us no special rights.
The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.
Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.
All healthy men have thought of their own suicide.
When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.
For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.
The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.
The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.
The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, ’less.
The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.
Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.
Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.
There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.
The loss of love is the loss of all rights, even though one had them all.
For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.
Betrayal answers betrayal, the mask of love is answered by the disappearance of love.
When love ceases to be tragic it is something else and the individual again throws himself in search of tragedy.
I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.