Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
— Albert Camus
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
Charm is a way of getting the answer 'Yes' without asking a clear question.
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
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.
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.
We are all special cases.
Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Integrity has no need of rules.
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
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.
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
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.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
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.
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
