Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but theconsequences and rules of action drawn from it.

...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.