I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.

Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.

The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

The innocent is the person who explains nothing