"Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it."

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

"If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living."

"The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind."

"...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way..."

"Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine."

"A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world."

"He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out it was the former that had condemned me."

"Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world."

"The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness."

"We are fighting for the distinction between sacrifice and mysticism, between energy and violence, between strength and cruelty, for that even finer distinction between the true and the false, between the man of the future and the cowardly gods you revere."

"O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!"

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

"Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst."

"...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves."

"I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea streaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere."

"Every time a man (myself) gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. Every time, it has always been the great misfortune of wanting to show off which has lessened me in the presence of the truth. We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give. There is much more strength in a man who reveals himself only when it is necessary. I have suffered from being alone, but because I have been able to keep my secret I have overcome the suffering of loneliness. To go right to the end implies knowing how to keep one's secret. And, today, there is no greater joy than to live alone and unknown."

"So it came to this, that- against the grain, no doubt-the condemned man had to hope the apparatus was in good working order! This, I thought, was a flaw in the system; and, on the face of it, my view was sound enough. On the other hand, I had to admit it proved the efficiency of the system. It came to this; the man under sentence was obliged to collaborate mentally, it was in his interest that all should go off without a hitch."

"There is not love of life without despair about life."

"I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man."

"Men die:and they are not happy."

"If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning."

"Beyond the curve of his days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity--happiness was human, eternity ordinary."

"False judges are held up in the world's admiration and I alone know the true ones."

"For him, too, starting over, departures, a new life had a certain luster, but he knew that only the impotent and the lazy attach happiness to such things. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. He could hear Zagreus: "Not the will to renounce, but the will to happiness."

"At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all accept these things."

"Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature."

"Freedom, "that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm," is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, however, when justice demands the suspension of freedom. Then terror, on a grand or small scale, makes its appearance to consummate the revolution. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. But one day nostalgia takes up arms and assumes the responsibility of total guilt; in other words, adopts murder and violence."

"He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."

"I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it."

"And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter."

"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself-so like a brother, really-I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

"The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself."

"An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts."

"There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined."

"I hope the dogs don't bark tonight. I always think it's mine."

"I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray."

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

"They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences."

"Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these, Tarrou may have been one of them, had desired reunion with something they couldn't have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace."

"We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible."

"And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire-and it would come to absolutely the same thing."

"Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day."

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

"Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being."

"It is necessary to fall in love " the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway."

"Life is the sum of all your choices."

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

"You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that."

"Stupidity has a knack for getting its way."