Quote collection
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"Do not be surprised. I do not like writers and I cannot stand their lies. They speak so as not to listen to themselves speak. If they did listen, they would know that they are nothing and then they would no longer be able to speak."
"Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate."
"Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears."
"I love life - that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life."
"Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone - all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it."
"We can't do without dominating others or being served.... The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back."
"A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape."
"And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from."
"Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man."
"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. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."
"If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning."
"Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?"
"Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth."
"Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined."
"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."
"At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary."
"What is a firm hand to me, of what use to me is this astonishing power if I cannot change the order of things, if I cannot make the sun set in the east, that suffering diminish and that beings no longer die?"
"History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God."
"From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth."
"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."