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.

Fate is not in man but around him

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.

We are not certain, we are never certain.

True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.

The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.