I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.
I love life – that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.
You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.
In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.
Those who write clearly have readers.
A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.
The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.
Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.
No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.
The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.
Without work all life goes rotten.
Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.
A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.