WednesdayFeb 25, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Sin is hoping for another life and...eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
Integrity has no need of rules.
Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, Blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
If there is a sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of it than in hoping for another and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have.
As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.
I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.
An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise... that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.
I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it, because it really didn't matter. But he cut me off and urged me one last time, drawing himself up to his full height and asking me if I believed in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless. 'Do you want my life to be meaningless?' he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn't have anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across the table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face and was screaming irrationally, 'I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive you for sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you?' I was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough. It was getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever I want to get rid of someone I'm not really listening to, I made it appear as if I agreed. To my surprise, he acted triumphant. 'You see, you see!' he said. 'You do believe, don't you, and you're going to place your trust in Him, aren't you?' Obviously, I again said no. He fell back in his chair.
Charm is getting the answer yes without asking a clear question.
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.
A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.
How many crimes committed merely because their authors could not endure being wrong!
I do not want to believe that death is the gateway to another life. For me, it is a closed door. I do not say it is a step we must all take, but that it is a horrible and dirty adventure.
True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself; hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.
There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.... Freedom is nothing else but a chance to bet better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.
Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved and not the reverse.
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not lead; Walk beside me, and just be my friend.
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.
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
I don't want to be a genius I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
Sin is hoping for another life and eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.
Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
When the body is sad, the heart languishes.
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.
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.
More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
In short, the moment I grasped that there was something to judge in me, I realized that there was in them an irresistible vocation for judgment.
People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
Do not wait for the last judgment. It takes place every day.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself.
I want to know if I can live with what I know, and only than.
I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
The look of success, when it is worn a certain way, would infuriate a jackass.
The act of love ... is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.
Some cry: Love me!! Others: Dont love me!! But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: Dont love me and be faithful to me!!
I love life thats my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood never!!!
There is only misfortune in not being loved; there is misery in not loving.
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.
The need to be right the sign of a vulgar mind.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!!
We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
Mon cher ami, lets not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us!!! Otherwise, well be left in shreds. We are forced to take the same precautions as the animal trainer. If, before going into the cage, he has the misfortune to cut himself while shaving, what a feast for the wild animals!!
The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.
Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.
Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
The struggle to reach the top is itself enough to fulfill the heart of man. One must believe that Sisyphus is happy.
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.
As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself so like a brother, really I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.
A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. Its a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
To those who despair of everything, reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
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.
There are some words that I have never really understood, such as sin.... For if there is sin against life, it lies perhaps less in despairing of it than in hoping for another life and evading the implacable grandeur of the one we have.
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
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