"Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard."

"To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing."

"What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?"

"They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it."

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants."

"There is so much sttuborn hope in a human heart."

"Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value and its face of eter1nal youth."

"There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done."

"There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."

"But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man."

"The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it."

"We call first truths those we discover after all the others."

"It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: "Close the window, it's too beautiful."

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

"A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."

"We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose - even for transforming murderers into judges."

"It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting."

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

"To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady."

"Psychology is action not thinking about oneself."

"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."

"He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs for one another."

"Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? 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."

"But the heart has its own memory and I have forgotten nothing."

"We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether, and why, we have the right to kill."

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

"Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes."

"I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history. Your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?"

"If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences."

"But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do."

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

"Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children."

"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."

"The spirit of rebellion can only exist in a society where a theoretical equality conceals great factual inequalities. The problem of rebellion, therefore, has no meaning except within our own Western society."

"Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil."

"Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery."

"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way."

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

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

"My soul's a burden to me, I've had enough of it. I'm eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every question. I don't belong here."

"We do not have feelings which change us, but feelings that suggest to us the idea of change. Thus love does not purge us of selfishness, but makes us aware of it and gives us the idea of a distant country where this selfishness will disappear."

"Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without."

"Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day."

"I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live."

"But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive."

"As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree."

"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."

"Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence."

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

"Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it."