You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest - women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.

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