There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don't want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.

This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.

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.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.