Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

It is necessary to fall in love... if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.

You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

A fate is not a punishment.

Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.

The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.