As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

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.

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

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.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

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.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

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

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

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.

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.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

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.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

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.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

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

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.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.

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

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

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.

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.

Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

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.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

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.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.