Naturally, in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.
There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.
He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.
The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.
I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life.
I clung to nothing, in a way I was calm. But it was a horrible calm – because of my body; my body, I saw with its eyes, I heard with its ears, but it was no longer me; it sweated and trembled by itself and I didn’t recognize it any more.
Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up; I forget them almost immediately.
To eat is to appropriate by destruction.
What do I care about Jupiter? Justice is a human issue, and I do not need a god to teach it to me.
One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.
I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.
Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.
Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.
I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.
Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it.
I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.