Commitment is an act, not a word.
Acting is a question of absorbing other people’s personalities and adding some of your own experience.
I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.
I exist, that is all, and I find it nauseating.
I never could bear the idea of anyone’s expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.
I have such a desire to sleep and am so much behind my sleep. A good night, one good night and all this nonsense will be swept away.
If literature isn’t everything, it’s not worth a single hour of someone’s trouble.
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.
I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
Life begins on the other side of despair.
Man is what he wills himself to be.
That God does not exist, I cannot deny, That my whole being cries out for God I cannot forget.
It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives.