What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

We [writers] must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.

The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.

For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn't know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

None of the evils which totalitarianism ... claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.

Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.