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
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.
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
Live to the point of tears.
You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion." [The Minotaur]
When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.
People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
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.
I would rather live my life as if there is a god and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is.
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.
There is not love of life without despair about life.
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
Life can be magnificent and overwhelming -- that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
What is a rebel? A man who says no.
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
You can't create experience, you undergo it.
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes from ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.
I rebel; therefore I exist.
We are all special cases.
Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.
Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.
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.
I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
Peace is the only battle worth waging.
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.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.
I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.
We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.
The need to be right - the sign of a vulgar mind.
I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.
And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.
Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
I love life - that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.
There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
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.
Integrity has no need of rules.
Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
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.
I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.
A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.
I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored
What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.
I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
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If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it. ~(Camus, as quoted by Tony Judt)
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.
We are all born mad, some remain so
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
I continue to believe that this world has no ultimate meaning. But I know that something in it has a meaning and that is man, because he is the only creature to insist on having one
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.
Life is a sum of all your choices". So, what are you doing today?
