When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.

Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.

The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.

It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.