Quote collection
985 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak."
"Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
"Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness."
"Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it."
"Stupidity has a knack of getting its way."
"If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation."
"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."
"The innocent is the person who explains nothing"
"No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people."
"Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine."
"Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly."
"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is."
"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.'"
"If pimps and thieves everywhere were always punished, honest people would all believe themselves always to be innocent."
"The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another."
"Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."
"It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it."
"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."
"I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis."
"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."