Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.

Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.