580 quotes found
“Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.”
“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”
“Let us seek the respite where it isin the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as dove...”
“She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.”
“She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too lit...”
“It's only artists who know how to use their eyes”
“Between the desolate earth and the colorless sky appeared an Image of the ungrateful world in which, for the first time, he came to himself at last. On this earth, restored to the despair of innoce...”
“He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most mag...”
“. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time?Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while.Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room;...”
“If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.”
“...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weakne...”
“In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nati...”
“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.”
“When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter...”
“How did I picture the life after the grave? I fairly bawled out at him: "A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.”
“Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory... Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. Th...”
“I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I s...”
“But memory is less disposed to compromise”
“Tarrou had "lost the match," as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of know...”
“We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Sin...”
