The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

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.

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.

You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer 'yes' without having asked any clear question.

For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

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

You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.

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

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

Only a philosophy of eternity, in the world today, could justify non-violence.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

How hard, how bitter it is to become a man!

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

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