An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.

The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.