Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.
People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.
It is better to burn than to disappear.
I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don't know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.
The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.
That's love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.
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.
Morality, when formal, devours.
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.
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?
Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
I was tormented by my desire for a woman ... I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their faces and crowded with my desires.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: