You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.

I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.