Don't walk behind me; I may not lead. Don't walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

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

Friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship - never.

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

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

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

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.

The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.

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

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

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

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

I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.

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

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

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.

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

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.

I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.

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.

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.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all.

Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death.

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

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.

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

Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and that is its whole secret.

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

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

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

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

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

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.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

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.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

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.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.