“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.”

“One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.”

“A loveless world is a dead world.”

“For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

“You can’t create experience, you undergo it.”

“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.”

“I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”

“If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.”

“Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.”

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”

“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”

“Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory…Everything is forgotten, even great love.”

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.”

“There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.”

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.”

“To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

“Fate is not in man but around him.”

“Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.”

“Peace is the only battle worth waging.”

“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”

“At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.”

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

“Good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.”

“Integrity has no need of rules.”

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”

“A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.”

“All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.”

“All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.”

“What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.”

“When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him”

“People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”

“People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.”

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”

“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”

“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.”

“There is not love of life without despair about life.”

“Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn’t desire is the hardest thing in the world.”

“For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering.”

“Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.”

“There is no frontier between being and appearing.”

“I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.”

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

“We rarely confide in those who are better than we. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don’t want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen.”

“I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.”

“We only know of one duty, and that is to love.”

“What is a rebel? A man who says no.”

“I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.”