Emotion is first of all and in principle an accident.

When one loves animals and children too much, one loves them against human beings.

In love, one and one are one.

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work.

I never could bear the idea of anyone's expecting something from me. It always made me want to do just the opposite.

Hell is--other people!

All I can do is make the best of what I am, become accustomed to it, evaluate the possibilities, and take advantage of them the best I can.

The plight of modern man is that he is condemmed to be free.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

In reality, people read because they want to write. Anyway, reading is a sort of rewriting.

I am alone now. Not quite alone. Hovering in front of me is still this idea. It has rolled itself into a ball, it stays there like a large cat; it explains nothing, it does not move, and contents itself with saying no.

Philosophy which does not help to illuminate the process of the liberation of the oppressed should be rejected.

Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.

There is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving.

Ha! to forget. How childish! I feel you in my bones. Your silence screams in my ears. You may nail your mouth shut, you may cut out your tongue, can you keep yourself from existing? Will you stop your thoughts.

I thought I saw Anny smiling. I try to refresh my memory: I need to feel all the tenderness that Anny inspires; it is there, this tenderness, it is near me, only asking to be born. But the smile does not return: it is finished. I remain dry and empty.

They are young and well built, they have another thirty years ahead of them. So they don't hurry, they take their time, and they are quite right. Once they have been to bed together, they will have to find something else to conceal the enormous absurdity of their existence.

Like morality, literature needs to be universal. So that the writer must put himself on the side of the majority, of the two billion starving, if he wishes to be able to speak to all and be read by all. Failing that, he is at the service of a privileged class and, like it, an exploiter.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die.