"

What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.

"

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

"

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-ho...more

"

Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the ...more

"

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

"

I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two.

"

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

"

It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.

"

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

"

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

"

Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the ...more

"

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

"

I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say

"

What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.

"

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his...more