Integrity has no need of rules.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
We are all special cases.
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.