Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.

The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.

At any streetcorner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face. As it is, in its distressing nudity, in its light without effulgence, it is elusive.

Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we d never be done with it.

After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

I know with certainty that a man's work is nothing but the long journey to recover, through the detours of art, the two or three simple and great images which first gained access to his heart.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.