Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will’s impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.
There is no more futile punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.
In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.
Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we’d never be done with it.
One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know.
In order to exist, man must rebel.
Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.
Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.
All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.
To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
Morality, when formal, devours.
As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.
In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.
May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!!
The truth, as the light, makes blind.
No, Father, I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.
Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in?