Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.

Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn't come in contact with death; that's why he can speak with such assurance of the truth-with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He'd try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its goodness.

The soul of a murderer is blind

Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.