Quote collection
985 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
"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."
"When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears."
"I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that I finally obey."
"Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then."
"The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion."
"Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work."
"We're going forward, but nothing changes."
"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."
"The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans."
"A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing."
"A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad."
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer."
"To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred."
"Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage."
"We are not so mad as to think that we shall create a world in which murder will not occur. We are fighting for a world in which murder will no longer be legal."
"It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about."
"We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others."
"The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits."
"We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking."