The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.
Integrity has no need of rules.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
We are all special cases.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.