I confused things with their names: that is belief.
We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and mute as stones, our very passivity would be an act.
Perhaps it’s inevitable, perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all and impersonating what one is.
So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! the farce. There is no need for torture: Hell is other people.
Man is abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no aim but what he sets himself.
God is absence. God is the solitude of man.
It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.
Ideas come in pairs and they contradict one another; their opposition is the principal engine of reflection.
It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it.
There are two ways of destroying a people. Either condemn them en bloc or force them to repudiate the leaders they adopted. The second is the worse.
For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.
If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake you are no longer authentic.
Men equally honest, equally devoted to their fatherland, are momentarily separated by different conceptions of their duty.
Hell is other people at breakfast.
You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.
Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.
If you die, I will lie down beside you and I will stay there until the end, without eating or drinking, you will rot in my arms and I will love you as carcass: for you love nothing if you do not love everything.
Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
I’d come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.
I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything.