People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.

They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.

I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.