The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.
The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.
I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.
Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.
The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.
Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up ruling over a desert.
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.
The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.
The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
To lose the touch of flowers and women’s hands is the supreme separation.
What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?