Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
If the world were clear, art would not exist.
Of course, true love is exceptional – two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.
Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
There are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye.
With rebellion, awareness is born.
The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.
It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.
Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.
The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.
But it’s not easy. I’ve been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn’t need words to make ourselves understood. But people don’t love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn’t.
In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.
If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.
People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe – they please each other, that’s all. Later on, when you’re old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That’s all it is.
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!