There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
...since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the hea...
Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Who taught you all this, doctor?"The reply came promptly:"Suffering.
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
Freedom, that terrible word inscribed on the chariot of the storm, is the motivating principle of all revolutions. Without it, justice seems inconceivable to the rebel's mind. There comes a time, howe...
Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference.
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
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.
I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two.
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them,...
Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to concea...
The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself.