Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it’s exigencies.
That’s what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
This has always been a man’s world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.
Art is an attempt to integrate evil.
Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.
What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.
Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.
Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.
I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.
The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.
No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.
The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.