(no subject)
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
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.
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.
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
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.
All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
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.
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
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.
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.
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
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.
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.
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
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.