It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.Collection: Finance
To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.Collection: History
I know of only one duty, and that is to love.Collection: Valentines
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.Collection: Moving
Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.Collection: Courage
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.Collection: Beauty
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.Collection: Experience
To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.Collection: Famous
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.Collection: Knowledge
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.Collection: Society
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.Collection: Work
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 heart first opened.Collection: Work
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.Collection: Intelligence
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.Collection: Future
Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.Collection: Men
You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.Collection: Experience
How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.Collection: Friendship
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.Collection: Truth
A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.Collection: Truth
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-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.Collection: Knowledge
Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.Collection: Age
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.Collection: Time
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.Collection: Hope
It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.Collection: Love
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.Collection: Death
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Future
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.Collection: Happiness
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.Collection: Art
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.Collection: Men
He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.Collection: Hope
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.Collection: Motivational
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.Collection: God
Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.Collection: Love
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.Collection: Respect
Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.Collection: Freedom
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.Collection: Death
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?Collection: Happiness
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.Collection: Nature
The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.Collection: Learning
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Respect
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.Collection: Nature
Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.Collection: Chance
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.Collection: Religion
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.Collection: Freedom
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.Collection: Society
The society based on production is only productive, not creative.Collection: Society
Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.Collection: Happiness
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.Collection: Truth