Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.
If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the thirst for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation.
Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.
The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all – he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
Great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.
The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.
Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.
I’d have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.
Happiness too is inevitable.
The work of art is born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.
When the body is sad, the heart languishes.
There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible.
A lot of jobs don’t allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.
Still, obviously, one can’t be sensible all the time.
It is better to burn than to disappear.
Those who love, friends and lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.
To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.