Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — That is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.

There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.

No human being, even the most passionately loved and passionately loving, is ever in our possession.

By what right, moreover, could a Christian or a Marxist accuse me, for example, of pessimism? I was not the one to invent the misery of the human being or the terrifying formulas of divine malediction.

Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.

At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

In the end, man is not entirely guilty — he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent — he continues it.

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

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.

Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.

I had only a little time left and I didn't want to waste it on God.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.

Totalitarian tyranny is not based on the virtues of the totalitarians. It is based on the mistakes of the liberals.

The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.

Live to the point of tears.

Liberty ultimately seems to me, for societies and for individuals, for labor and for culture, the supreme good that governs all others.

If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules.

History without a value to transfigure it, is controlled by the law of expediency.

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.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

That's what a genius is: an intelligence that knows its limits.