Nothing in life is worth,turning your back on,if you love it.

I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.

They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.

Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.

What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

Live to the point of tears.

Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.

I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.

If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep

The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it. (as quoted by Tony Judt)

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide.

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. "Everything is permitted" does not mean that nothing is forbidden.

There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.

Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true, and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.

Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.

Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.

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.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.

The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.

A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.

Hope cannot be eluded forever and that it can beset even those who wanted to be free of it.

When innocence has its eyes gouged out, a Christian must lose his faith or accept the gouging out of eyes.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.

Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement.

Time drips, heavy, slow…

What he did not know he did not claim to know.