We must act out passion before we can feel it.
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.
Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.
I felt myself in a solitude so frightful that I contemplated suicide. What held me back was the idea that no one, absolutely no one, would be moved by my death, that I would be even more alone in death than in life.
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.