“Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
“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.”
“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
“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.”
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”
“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”
“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.”
“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”
“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The need to be right - the sign of a vulgar mind.”
“There is not love of life without despair about life.”
“I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.”
“If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.”
“Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.”
“If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.”
“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”
“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.”
“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 most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.”
“...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.”
“We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.”
“My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.”
“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”
“You always get exaggerated notions about things you don't know anything about.”
“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.”
“Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.”
“Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.”
“Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.”
“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”
“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)”
“There is no frontier between being and appearing.”
“We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.”
“Liberty is the right not to lie.”
“A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.”
“For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.”
“One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn’t even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.”
“No ends, simply means.”
“A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.”
“It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”
“If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.”
“For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.”
“From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.”
