There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.

If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.

But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.

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.'

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.

I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.