But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.

It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'

Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.

I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still had any meaning for me.

You know, [women] do not really condemn any weakness: rather, they try to humiliate or disarm our strengths. That is why women arethe reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

There is scarcely any passion without struggle.