"And despite the clamors and the violence, we tried to preserve in our hearts the memory of a happy sea, of a remembered hill, the smile of a beloved face."

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

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

"Women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations."

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

"You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history."

"Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn't understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn't much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness."

"In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist."

"No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition."

"I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude."

"I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say."

"There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted."

"There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up."

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."

"Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better."

"The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable."

"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way, as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves."

"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."

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

"It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization."

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

"People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves."

"Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism."

"The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits."

"Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me, just be my friend."

"Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai dA©couvert en moi un invincible A©tA©."

"Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom."

"Don't let them tell us stories."

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

"A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition, you cannot hear him but you see his incomprehensible dumb-show and you wonder why he is alive."

"Living above the world, each discovering his own weight, seeing his face brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence that was at once a judge and a justification among them. The world, here, became a personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those in whom equilibrium has not killed love."

"Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in an action, can avoid committing murder."

"Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be."

"The innocent is the person who explains nothing."

"I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement it takes place every day."

"...luck is not to be coerced."

"What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support."

"But memory is less disposed to compromise."

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

"I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold."

"After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion."

"If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it."

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide."

"She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage."

"Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything."

"When a man has learned how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, then he has little left to learn."

"One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves."

"To know oneself, one should assert oneself."

"If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man."

"A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images."