A loveless world is a dead world.
The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.
All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.
Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.
I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.
Liberty is the right not to lie.
Nothing in life is worth turning your back on if you love it.
I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.
I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.
Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future – and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.
An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don’t believe there is a single person I loved that I didn’t eventually betray.
For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.