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To Cut Short This Question Of The Law Of Retaliation, We Must Note That Even In Its Primitive Form It Can Operate Only Between Two Individuals Of Whom One Is Absolutely Innocent And The Other Absolutely Guilty. The Victim, To Be Sure, Is Innocent. But Can The Society That Is Supposed To Represent The Victim Lay Claim To Innocence?

-Albert Camus

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To Cut Short This

Albert Camus

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To Cut Short This Question Of The Law Of Retaliation, We Must Note That Even In Its Primitive Form It Can Operate Only Between Two Individuals Of Whom One Is Absolutely Innocent And The Other Absolutely Guilty. The Victim, To Be Sure, Is Innocent. But Can The Society That Is Supposed To Represent The Victim Lay Claim To Innocence?

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The Absurd Is The Essential Concept And The First Truth.

Nothing Is More Despicable Than Respect Based On Fear.

Poverty, First Of All Was Never A Misfortune For Me; It Was Radiant With Sunlight.. I Owe It To My Family, First Of All, Who Lacked Everything And Who Envied Practically Nothing.

... I Suppose That It Is Not So Easy To Go Home And It Takes A Bit Of Time To Make A Son Out Of A Stranger.

For Years I've Wanted To Live According To Everyone Else's Morals. I've Forced Myself To Live Like Everyone Else, To Look Like Everyone Else. I Said What Was Necessary To Join Together, Even When I Felt Separate. And After All Of This, Catastrophe Came. Now I Wander Amid The Debris, I Am Lawless, Torn To Pieces, Alone And Accepting To Be So, Resigned To My Singularity And To My Infirmities. And I Must Rebuild A Truth-after Having Lived All My Life In A Sort Of Lie.

When One Has No Character, One Has To Apply A Method. Here It Did Wonders Incontrovertibly, And I Am Living On The Site Of One Of The Greatest Crimes In Human History.

There Is A Terrible Emptiness In Me, An Indifference That Hurts.

To Live Is In Itself A Value Judgment. To Breathe Is To Judge.

What Would Become Of The World If The Condemned Started To Confide Their Heartaches To The Executioners?

No Doubt Our Love Was Still There, But Quite Simply It Was Unusable, Heavy To Carry, Inert Inside Of Us, Sterile As Crime Or Condemnation. It Was No Longer Anything Except A Patience With No Future And A Stubborn Wait.

...we Rarely Confide In Those Who Are Better Than We. Rather, We Are More Inclined To Flee Their Society. Most Often, On The Other Hand, We Confess To Those Who Are Like Us And Who Share Our Weaknesses. Hence We Don't Want To Improve Ourselves And Be Bettered, For We Should First Have To Be Judged In Default. We Merely Wish To Be Pitied And Encouraged In The Course We Have Chosen. In Short, We Should Like, At The Same Time, To Cease Being Guilty And Yet Not To Make The Effort Of Cleansing Ourselves.

Great Ideas, It Has Been Said, Come Into The World As Gently As Doves. Perhaps Then, If We Listen Attentively, We Shall Hear Amid The Uproar Of Empires And Nations, A Faint Flutter Of Wings, The Gentle Stirring Of Life And Hope. Some Will Say That This Hope Lies In A Nation; Others In A Man. I Believe Rather That It Is Awakened, Revived, Nourished, By Millions Of Solitary Individuals Whose And Works Every Day Negate Frontiers And The Crudest Implications Of History.

There Is But One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem And That Is Suicide.

Always Go Too Far, Because That's Where You'll Find The Truth

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.

Man Is The Only Creature That Refuses To Be What He Is.

Life Should Be Lived To The Point Of Tears

I Don’t Know Whether This World Has A Meaning That Transcends It. But I Know That I Cannot Know That Meaning And That It Is Impossible For Me Just Now To Know It.

Like Great Works, Deep Feelings Always Mean More Than They Are Conscious Of Saying.

The Only Way To Deal With An Unfree World Is To Become So Absolutely Free That Your Very Existence Is An Act Of Rebellion.

Yes, I Know What Passion Would Fill Me With All Its Power. Before, I Was Too Young. I Got In The Way. Now I Know That Acting And Loving And Suffering Is Living, Of Course, But It’s Only Living Insofar As You Can Be Transparent And Accept Your Fate, Like The Unique Reflection Of A Rainbow Of Joys And Passions Which Is The Same For Everyone.

Slave Camps Under The Flag Of Freedom, Massacres Justified By Philanthropy Or The Taste Of The Superhuman, Cripple Judgment. On The Day When Crime Puts On The Apparel Of Innocence, Through A Curious Reversal Peculiar To Our Age, It Is Innocence That Is Called On To Justify Itself. The Purpose Of This Essay Is To Accept And Study That Strange Challenge.

The Slave Begins By Demanding Justice And Ends By Wanting To Wear A Crown.

A Writer Cannot Put Himself Today In Service Of Those Who Make History; He Is At The Service Of Those Who Suffer It.

If Christianity Is Pessimistic As To Man, It Is Optimistic As To Human Destiny. Well, I Can Say That, Pessimistic As To Human Destiny, I Am Optimistic As To Man.

We're All Special Cases.

An Achievement Is A Bondage. It Obliges One To A Higher Achievement.

I Felt That I Had Been Happy And That I Was Happy Again. For Everything To Be Consummated, For Me To Feel Less Alone, I Had Only To Wish That There Be A Large Crowd Of Spectators The Day Of My Execution And That They Greet Me With Cries Of Hate.

For The Existentials, Negation Is Their God. To Be Precise, That God Is Maintained Only Through The Negation Of Human Reason. But, Like Suicides, Gods Change With Men.

In The World There Is, Parallel To The Force Of Death And Constraint, An Enormous Force Of Persuasion That Is Called Culture.

What Made Me Run Away Was Doubtless Not So Much The Fear Of Settling Down, But Of Settling Down Permanently In Something Ugly.

We Continue To Shape Our Personality All Our Life. If We Knew Ourselves Perfectly, We Should Die.

This World, Such As It Is, Is Not Tolerable. Therefore I Need The Moon, Or Happiness, Or Immortality, I Need Something Which Is Perhaps Demented, But Which Is Not Of This World.

A Living Man Can Be Enslaved And Reduced To The Historic Condition Of An Object. But If He Dies In Refusing To Be Enslaved, He Reaffirms The Existence Of Another Kind Of Human Nature Which Refuses To Be Classified As An Object.

The Contradiction Is This: Man Rejects The World As It Is, Without Accepting The Necessity Of Escaping It. In Fact, Men Cling To The World And By Far The Majority Do Not Want To Abandon It.

Having Money Is A Way Of Being Free Of Money.

The Need To Be Right Is The Sign Of A Vulgar Mind.

It Is Always Easy To Be Logical. It Is Almost Impossible To Be Logical To The Bitter End.

All I Maintain Is That On This Earth There Are Pestilences And There Are Victims, And It's Up To Us, So Far As Possible, Not To Join Forces With The Pestilences. That May Sound Simple To The Point Of Childishness; I Can't Judge If It's Simple, But I Know It's True.

After All, Every Murderer When He Kills Runs The Risk Of The Most Dreadful Of Deaths, Whereas Those Who Kill Him Risk Nothing Except Promotion.

What Is Human In Me Is Not What Is Best In Me. What Is Human In Me Is That I Desire, And To Obtain What I Desire, I Believe I Would Crush Anything That Stood In My Way.

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.

Absurdity Of Life

Where Would His Torture Be, Indeed, If At Every Step The Hope Of Succeeding Upheld Him?

The Only Serious Question In Life Is Whether To Kill Yourself Or Not.

I Lived With The Only Continuity, Day To Day, Of The Me-me-me.

We Must Stitch Up What Has Been Torn Apart, Render Justice Imaginable In The World Which Is So Obviously Unjust, Make Happiness Meaningful For Nations Poisoned By The Misery Of This Century. Naturally, It Is A Superhuman Task. But Tasks Are Called Superhuman When Men Take A Long Time To Complete Them, That Is All.

Powerful, Yes, That Is The Word That I Constantly Rolled On My Tongue, I Dreamed Of Absolute Power, The Kind That Forces Others Tokneel, That Forces The Enemy To Capitulate, Finally Converting Him, And The More The Enemy Is Blind, Cruel, Sure Of Himself, Buried In His Conviction, The More His Admission Proclaims The Royalty Of He Who Has Brought On His Defeat.

You Will Always Win If You Make An Effort, No Matter How Much. However, If You Failed It Means You Were Too Lazy.

Independence Is Earned By A Few Words Of Cheap Confidence

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.

The French Revolution Gave Birth To No Artists But Only To A Great Journalist, Desmoulins, And To An Under-the-counter Writer, Sade. The Only Poet Of The Times Was The Guillotine.

It Is Not The World That Is Absurd, Nor Human Thought: The Absurd Arises When The Human Need To Understand Meets The Unreasonableness Of The World, When 'my Appetite For The Absolute And For Unity' Meets 'the Impossibility Of Reducing This World To A Rational And Reasonable Principle.'

I Am Alive Again, Now That I Can No Longer Stand To Live.

All Systems Of Morality Are Based On The Idea That An Action Has Consequences That Legitimize Or Cancel It. A Mind Imbued With The Absurd Merely Judges That Those Consequences Must Be Considered Calmly.

Actions Have Consequences

The Soul Of A Murderer Is Blind

Every Stone Here Sweats With Suffering, I Know That. I Have Never Looked At Them Without A Feeling Of Anguish. But Deep In My Heart I Know That The Most Wretched Among You Have Seen A Divine Face Emerge From Their Darkness. That Is The Face You Are Asked To See.

The Nobility Of Our Calling Will Always Be Rooted In Two Commitments Difficult To Observe: Refusal To Lie About What We Know, And Resistance To Oppression.

How Had I Not Seen That There Was Nothing More Important Than An Execution, And That When You Come Right Down To It, It Was The Only Thing A Man Could Truly Be Interested In?

Proof Is Never Definitive, After All; One Has To Begin Again With Each New Person.

... It Is True That I Do Not Respect [human Life] More Than I Respect My Own Life. And If It Is Easy For Me To Kill, That Is Because It Is Difficult For Me To Die.

From Paul To Stalin, The Popes Who Have Chosen Caesar Have Prepared The Way For Caesars Who Quickly Learn To Despise Popes.

A Person I Knew Used To Divide Human Beings Into Three Categories: Those Who Prefer To Have Nothing To Hide Rather Than Being Obliged To Lie, Those Who Prefer Lying To Having Nothing To Hide, And Finally Those Who Like Both Lying And The Hidden.

Man Is An Idea, And A Precious Small Idea Once He Turns His Back On Love.

Precious Stones

There Always Comes A Time When One Must Choose Between Contemplation And Action. This Is Called Becoming A Man.

I Enjoyed My Own Nature To The Fullest, And We All Know There Lies Happiness, Although, To Soothe One Another Mutually, We Occasionally Pretend To Condemn Such Joys As Selfishness.

Analysis Of Rebellion Leads At Least To The Suspicion That, Contrary To The Postulates Of Contemporary Thought, A Human Nature Does Exist, As The Greeks Believed. Why Rebel If There Is Nothing Permanent In Oneself Worth Preserving? ... Rebellion, Though Apparently Negative, Since It Creates Nothing, Is Profoundly Positive In That It Reveals The Part Of Man Which Must Always Be Defended.

Every Rebellion Implies Some Kind Of Unity.

I Have The Loftiest Idea, And The Most Passionate One, Of Art. Much Too Lofty To Agree To Subject It To Anything. Much Too Passionate To Want To Divorce It From Anything.

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.

Life Is The Result Of All Your Choices.

More And More, When Faced With The World Of Men, The Only Reaction Is One Of Individualism. Man Alone Is An End Unto Himself. Everything One Tries To Do For The Common Good Ends In Failure.

I Conceived At Least One Great Love In My Life, Of Which I Was Always The Object.

I Leave Sisyphus At The Foot Of The Mountain. One Always Finds One's Burden Again. But Sisyphus Teaches The Higher Fidelity That Negates The Gods And Raises Rocks. He Too Concludes That All Is Well. This Universe Henceforth Without A Master Seems To Him Neither Sterile Nor Futile. Each Atom Of That Stone, Each Mineral Flake Of That Night-filled Mountain, In Itself, Forms A World. The Struggle Itself Toward The Heights Is Enough To Fill A Man's Heart. One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy.

Murder Is Terribly Exhausting.

Without Culture, And The Relative Freedom It Implies, Society, Even When Perfect, Is But A Jungle. This Is Why Any Authentic Creation Is A Gift To The Future.

Art And Culture

False Judges Are Held Up In The World's Admiration And I Alone Know The True Ones.

[love] Is The Type Of Disease That Spares Neither The Intelligent Nor The Idiotic.

Purely Historical Thought Is Therefore Nihilistic: It Wholeheartedly Accepts The Evil Of History And In This Way Is Opposed To Rebellion.

I Felt The Urge To Reassure Him That I Was Like Everybody Else, Just Like Everybody Else.

But In Order To Speak About All And To All, One Has To Speak Of What All Know And Of The Reality Common To Us All. The Seas, Rains, Necessity, Desire, The Struggle Against Death--these Are Things That Unite Us All. We Resemble One Another In What We See Together, In What We Suffer Together. Dreams Change From Individual, But The Reality Of The World Is Common To Us All. Striving Towards Realism Is Therefore Legitimate, For It Is Basically Related To The Artistic Adventure.

... Habit Starts At The Second Crime. At The First One, Something Is Ending.

God Is Not Necessary To Create Culpability, Or To Punish. Our Fellow Men Are Enough For That, Helped By Ourselves.

A Loveless World Is A Dead World.

Maman Used To Say That You Can Always Find Something To Be Happy About.

There Are People Who Vindicate The World, Who Help Others Live Just By Their Presence.

The Great Courage Is To Stare As Squarely At The Light As At Death.

We Are All Special Cases.

Man Cannot Do Without Beauty, And This Is What Our Era Pretends To Want To Disregard.

No Matter How The Sun Shone, The Sea Held Forth No More Promises.

Existence Is Illusory And It Is Eternal.

Accepting The Absurdity Of Everything Around Us Is One Step, A Necessary Experience: It Should Not Become A Dead End. It Arouses A Revolt That Can Become Fruitful

The First Progressive Step For A Mind Overwhelmed By The Strangeness Of Things Is To Realize That This Feeling Of Strangeness Is Shared With All Men And That Human Reality, In Its Entirety, Suffers From The Distance Which Separates It From The Rest Of The Universe.

Believe Me, For Certain Men At Least, Not Taking What One Doesn't Desire Is The Hardest Thing In The World.

A Régime [nazism] Which Invented A Biological Foreign Policy Was Obviously Acting Against Its Own Best Interests. But At Least It Obeyed Its Own Particular Logic.

Ah Cher Ami, How Poor In Invention Men Are! They Are They Always Think One Commits Suicide For A Reason. But It's Quite Possible To Commit Suicide For Two Reasons. No, That Never Occurs To Them. So What's The Good Of Dying Intentionally, Of Sacrificing Yourself To The Idea You Want People To Have Of You? Once You Are Dead, They Will Take Advantage Of It To Attribute Idiotic Or Vulgar Motives To Your Action. Martyrs, Cher Ami, Must Choose Between Being Forgotten, Mocked, Or Made Use Of. As For Being Understood--never!

No Ends, Simply Means.

Idleness Is Fatal Only To The Mediocre.

From The Evening Breeze To This Hand On My Shoulder, Everything Has Its Truth.

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.

And I Too, Felt Ready To Start Life All Over Again. It Was As If That Great Rush Of Anger Had Washed Me Clean, Emptied Me Of Hope, And, Gazing Up At The Dark Sky Spangled With Its Signs And Stars, For The First Time, The First, I Laid My Heart Open To The Benign Indifference Of The Universe.

There Is A Life And There Is A Death, And There Are Beauty And Melancholy Between.

It Is Immoral Not To Tell.

As Soon As One Does Not Kill Oneself, One Must Keep Silent About Life.

For The First Time, The First, I Laid My Heart Open To The Benign Indifference Of The Universe. To Feel It So Like Myself, Indeed So Brotherly, Made Me Realize That I'd Been Happy, And That I Was Happy Still.

All Great Deeds And All Great Thoughts Have A Ridiculous Beginning. Great Works Are Often Born On A Street Corner Or In A Restaurant's Revolving Door.

Realism Should Only Be The Means Of Expression Of Religious Genius... Or, At The Other Extreme, The Artistic Expressions Of Monkeys Which Are Quite Satisfied With Mere Imitation. In Fact, Art Is Never Realistic Though Sometimes It Is Tempted To Be. To Be Really Realistic A Description Would Have To Be Endless.

I Know Simply That The Sky Will Last Longer Than I.

In The Depths Of Winter, I Finally Learned That Within Me There Lay An Invincible Summer.

If The Only Significant History Of Human Thought Were To Be Written, It Would Have To Be The History Of Its Successive Regrets And Its Impotences.

Myth Of Sisyphus

Have Pity, Lord, On Those Who Love And Are Separated.

So The Thing That Bothered Me Most Was That The Condemned Man Had To Hope The Machine Would Work The First Time.

Once One's Up Against It, The Precise Manner Of One's Death Has Obviously Small Importance.

We Are Not Certain, We Are Never Certain. If We Were We Could Reach Some Conclusions, And We Could, At Last, Make Others Take Us Seriously.

What, Then, Is That Incalculable Feeling That Deprives The Mind Of The Sleep Necessary To Life? A World That Can Be Explained Even With Bad Reasons Is A Familiar World. But, On The Other Hand, In A Universe Suddenly Divested Of Illusions And Lights, Man Feels An Alien, A Stranger. His Exile Is Without Remedy Since He Is Deprived Of The Memory Of A Lost Home Or The Hope Of A Promised Land. This Divorce Between Man And His Life, The Actor And His Setting, Is Properly The Feeling Of Absurdity.

All Modern Revolutions Have Ended In A Reinforcement Of The Power Of The State.

Every Great Work Makes The Human Face More Admirable And Richer, And This Is Its Whole Secret.

Get Scared. It Will Do You Good. Smoke A Bit, Stare Blankly At Some Ceilings, Beat Your Head Against Some Walls, Refuse To See Some People, Paint And Write. Get Scared Some More. Allow Your Little Mind To Do Nothing But Function. Stay Inside, Go Out - I Don't Care What You'll Do; But Stay Scared As Hell. You Will Never Be Able To Experience Everything. So, Please, Do Poetical Justice To Your Soul And Simply Experience Yourself.

Experience Yourself

Ah! My Friend, For Whomever Is Alone, Without A God And Without A Master, The Weight Of Time Is Terrible. One Must Then Choose A Master, God Being Out Of Style.

What Is A Rebel? A Man Who Says No.

Obstinacy Alone Is Not A Virtue.

For What Gives Value To Travel Is Fear. It Breaks Down A Kind Of Inner Structure We Have. Travel Robs Us Of Such Refuge. Far From Our Own People, Our Own Language, Stripped Of All Our Props, Deprived Of Our Masks (one Doesn't Know The Fare On The Streetcars, Or Anything Else), We Are Completely On The Surface Of Ourselves.

Those Who Lack The Courage Will Always Find A Philosophy To Justify It.

We Have Art In Order Not To Die Of Life.

Beginning To Think Is Beginning To Be Undermined.

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

If Only Nature Is Real And If, In Nature, Only Desire And Destruction Are Legitimate, Then, In That All Humanity Does Not Suffice To Assuage The Thirst For Blood, The Path Of Destruction Must Lead To Universal Annihilation.

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.

Without Work All Life Goes Rotten.

I Longed To Be Forgotten In Order To Be Able To Complain To Myself.

We Call First Truths Those We Discover After All The Others.

Every Time I Hear A Political Speech Or I Read Those Of Our Leaders, I Am Horrified At Having, For Years, Heard Nothing Which Sounded Human. It Is Always The Same Words Telling The Same Lies. And The Fact That Men Accept This, That The People’s Anger Has Not Destroyed These Hollow Clowns, Strikes Me As Proof That Men Attribute No Importance To The Way They Are Governed; That They Gamble – Yes, Gamble – With A Whole Part Of Their Life And Their So Called 'vital Interests.

[liberty] Is A Choreand A Long-distance Race, Quite Solitary, Quite Exhausting.

Too Many Have Dispensed With Generosity In Order To Practice Charity.

There Is Scarcely Any Passion Without Struggle.

Of Course, True Love Is Exceptional - Two Or Three Times A Century, More Or Less. The Rest Of The Time There Is Vanity Or Boredom.

Any Country Where I Am Not Bored Is A Country That Teaches Me Nothing.

Men Who Have Greatness Within Them Don't Go In For Politics.

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.

Freedom Is Not A Gift Received From The State Or Leader, But A Possession To Be Won Every Day By The Effort Of Each And The Union Of All.

The Absurd Is Lucid Reason Noting Its Limits.

May Heaven Protect Us, Cher Monsieur, From Being Set On A Pedestal By Our Friends!!!

Morality, When Formal, Devours.

There Is Always A Philosophy For Lack Of Courage.

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.

Some People Talk In Their Sleep. Lecturers Talk While Other People Sleep.

How Hard It Must Be To Live Only With What One Knows And What One Remembers, Cut Off From What One Hopes For!

The Struggle Itself Towards The Heights Is Enough To Fill A Man's Heart. One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy.

You Know, [women] Do Not Really Condemn Any Weakness: Rather, They Try To Humiliate Or Disarm Our Strengths. That Is Why Women Arethe Reward, Not Of The Warrior, But Of The Criminal.

The Reasoning Is Classic In Its Clarity. If God Does Not Exist, Kirilov Is God. If God Does Not Exist, Kirilov Must Kill Himself. Kirilov Must Therefore Kill Himself To Become God. That Logic Is Absurd, But It Is What Is Needed.

What Really Counted Was The Possibility Of Escape, A Leap To Freedom, Out Of The Implacable Ritual, A Wild Run For It That Would Give Whatever Chance For Hope There Was. Of Course, Hope Meant Being Cut Down On Some Street Corner, As You Ran Like Mad, By A Random Bullet. But When I Really Thought It Through, Nothing Was Going To Allow Me Such A Luxury. Everything Was Against It; I Would Just Be Caught Up In The Machinery Again.

Don't Lies Eventually Lead To The Truth? And Don't All My Stories, True Or False, Tend Toward The Same Conclusion? Don't They All Have The Same Meaning? So What Does It Matter Whether They Are True Or False If, In Both Cases, They Are Significant Of What I Have Been And What I Am? Sometimes It Is Easier To See Clearly Into The Liar Than Into The Man Who Tells The Truth. Truth, Like Light, Blinds. Falsehood, On The Contrary, Is A Beautiful Twilight That Enhances Every Object.

Utopia Is That Which Is In Contradiction With Reality.

In Fact, It Comes To This: Nobody Is Capable Of Really Thinking About Anyone, Even In The Worst Calamity. For Really To Think About Someone Means Thinking About That Person Every Minute Of The Day, Without Letting One’s Thoughts Be Diverted By Anything- By Meals, By A Fly That Settles On One’s Cheek, By Household Duties, Or By A Sudden Itch Somewhere. But There Are Always Flies And Itches. That’s Why Life Is Difficult To Live.

Everybody Knows That Pestilences Have A Way Of Recurring In The World; Yet Somehow We Find It Hard To Believe In Ones That Crash Down On Our Heads From A Blue Sky.

The Mind's Deepest Desire, Even In Its Most Elaborate Operations, Parallels Man's Unconscious Feeling In The Face Of His Universe: It Is An Insistence Upon Familiarity, An Appetite For Clarity.

The Love Of God Is A Hard Love. It Demands Total Self-surrender, Disdain Of Our Human Personality. And Yet It Alone Can Reconcile Us To Suffering And The Deaths Of Children, It Alone Can Justify Them, Since We Cannot Understand Them, And We Can Only Make God's Will Ours.

Does The End Justify The Means? That Is Possible. But What Will Justify The End? To That Question, Which Historical Thought Leaves Pending, Rebellion Replies: The Means.

One Cannot Be A Part-time Nihilist.

No Excuses Ever, For Anyone; That Is My Principle At The Outset. I Deny The Good Intention, The Respectable Mistake, The Indiscretion, The Extenuating Circumstance. With Me There Is No Giving Of Absolution Or Blessing.

Violence Is Both Unavoidable And Unjustifiable.

The Innocent Is The Person Who Explains Nothing

The Spirit Of Rebellion Can Only Exist In A Society Where A Theoretical Equality Conceals Great Factual Inequalities. The Problem Of Rebellion, Therefore, Has No Meaning Except Within Our Own Western Society.

In Our Well-policed Society We Recognize That An Illness Is Serious From The Fact That We Don't Dare Speak Of It Directly.

In Order To Exist, Man Must Rebel, But Rebellion Must Respect The Limits That It Discovers In Itself - Limits Where Minds Meet, And In Meeting, Begin To Exist.

Once Crime Was As Solitary As A Cry Of Protest; Now It Is As Universal As Science. Yesterday It Was Put On Trial; Today It Determines The Law.

[paris] Is Dirty. It Has Pigeons And Black Yards. The People Have White Skin.

Knowing What [christ] Knew , Knowing All About Mankind--ah! Who Would Have Thought That The Crime Is Not So Much To Make Others Die, But To Die Oneself--confronted Day And Night With His Innocent Crime, It Became Too Difficult To Go On. It Was Better To Get It Over With, To Not Defend Himself, To Die, In Order Not To Be The Only One To Have Survived, And To Go Elsewhere, Where, Perhaps, He Would Be Supported.

One Leader, One People, Signifies One Master And Millions Of Slaves.

The Real 19th Century Prophet Was Dostoevsky, Not Karl Marx.

Where There Is No Hope, It Is Incumbent On Us To Invent It.

Crime Too Is A Form Of Solitude, Even If One Thousand Get Together To Commit It. And It Is Right For Me To Die Alone, After Having Lived And Killed Alone.

Art Does Not Tolerate Reason.

In Our Society, Any Man Who Doesn't Cry At His Mother's Funeral Is Liable To Be Condemned To Death.

What The World Expects Of Christians Is That Christians Should Speak Out, Loud And Clear... In Such A Way That Never A Doubt, Never The Slightest Doubt, Could Rise In The Heart Of The Simplest Man.

The Byronic Hero, Incapable Of Love, Or Capable Only Of An Impossible Love, Suffers Endlessly. He Is Solitary, Languid, His Condition Exhausts Him. If He Wants To Feel Alive, It Must Be In The Terrible Exaltation Of A Brief And Destructive Action.

The Kingdom Of Heaven Will, In Fact, Appear On Earth , But It Will Be Ruled Over By Men A Mere Handful To Begin With, Who Will Be The Cassars, Because They Were The First To Understand And Later, With Time, By All Men.

If Nothing Had Any Meaning, You Would Be Right. But There Is Something That Still Has A Meaning.

Meaning Of Life

Likewise And During Every Day Of An Unillustrious Life, Time Carries Us. But A Moment Always Comes When We Have To Carry It.

The Artist Forges Himself To The Others, Midway Between The Beauty He Cannot Do Without And The Community He Cannot Tear Himself Away From. That Is Why True Artists Scorn Nothing: They Are Obliged To Understand Rather Than To Judge.

The Poor Man Whom Everyone Speaks Of, The Poor Man Whom Everyone Pities, One Of The Repulsive Poor From Whom Charitable Souls Keep Their Distance, He Has Still Said Nothing. Or, Rather, He Has Spoken Through The Voice Of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At Least, They Said So. And These Shameful Impostures Fed Their Authors. Cruel Irony, The Poor Man Tormented With Hunger Feeds Those Who Plead His Case.

I Had Been Right I Was Still Right I Was Always Right. I Had Lived My Life One Way And I Could Just As Well Lived It Another. I Had Done This And I Hadn T Done That. I Hadn T Done This Thing And I Had Done Another. And So?

One Might Think, That A Period Which, Within Fifty Years, Uproots, Enslaves Or Kills Seventy Million Human Beings, Should Only, And Forthwith, Be Condemned. But Also Its Guilt Must Be Understood.

But Sometimes It Takes More Courage To Live Than To Shoot Yourself.

The Future Is The Only Kind Of Property That The Masters Willingly Concede To The Slaves.

Democracy Is Not The Law Of The Majority But The Protection Of The Minority.

Truly Fertile Music, The Only Kind That Will Move Us, That We Shall Truly Appreciate, Will Be A Music Conducive To Dream, Which Banishes All Reason And Analysis. One Must Not Wish First To Understand And Then To Feel. Art Does Not Tolerate Reason.

Life Can Be Magnificent And Overwhelming -- That Is The Whole Tragedy. Without Beauty, Love, Or Danger It Would Almost Be Easy To Live.

Do Not Wait For The Last Judgment. It Takes Place Every Day.

Note, Besides, That It Is No More Immoral To Directly Rob Citizens Than To Slip Indirect Taxes Into The Price Of Goods That They Cannot Do Without.

We Do Not Know How To Eliminate Evil, But We Do Know How To Feed Some Of The Hungry And Heal Some Of The Infirmed.

The Revolutionary Government Was Required To Become The Government Of The War.

It Is Better To Burn Than To Disappear.

Men Die And They Are Not Happy.

Love Is The Kind Of Illness That Does Not Spare The Intelligent Or The Dull.

Great Novelists Are Philosopher Novelists - That Is, The Contrary Of Thesis-writers.

Working Conditions For Me Have Always Been Those Of The Monastic Life: Solitude And Frugality. Except For Frugality, They Are Contrary To My Nature, So Much So That Work Is A Violence I Do To Myself.

Working Conditions

The Tragedy Is Not That We Are Alone, But That We Cannot Be. At Times I Would Give Anything In The World To No Longer Be Connected By Anything To This Universe Of Men.

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.

Mostly, I Could Tell, I Made Him Feel Uncomfortable. He Didn't Understand Me, And He Was Sort Of Holding It Against Me. I Felt The Urge To Reassure Him That I Was Like Everybody Else, Just Like Everybody Else. But Really There Wasn't Much Point, And I Gave Up The Idea Out Of Laziness.

I Understood, By Dint Of Digging Into My Memories, That Modesty Helped Me To Shine, Humility Helped Me To Triumph And Virtue To Oppress.

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Barbara Johnson

Gabrielle Reece

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