Who would dare speak the word “happiness” in these tortured times? Yet millions today continue to seek happiness. These years have been for them only a prolonged postponement, at the end of which they hope to find that the possibility for happiness has been renewed. Who could blame them? And who could say that they are wrong? What would justice be without the chance for happiness? What purpose would freedom serve, if we had to live in misery?
We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink.
We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating.
To assert, in any case, that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no one in his right mind will believe this today.
There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
There is no love of life without despair of life.
There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.
There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that’s the best they can hope for.
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it.
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.