“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.”

“Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.”

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

“A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.”

“Nothing in life is worth,turning your back on,if you love it.”

“You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.”

“I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.”

“Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as Ive said before, bugs in amber.”

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

“Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.”

“Maybe I should have gone into politics. If you were a political activist, election season brought moments of intensity, whichever side you were on, and meanwhile here I was inarguably withering away,”

“What, more realistically, is this mutation, the new man? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogues dream; the free-thinker ...”

“As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, and...”

“I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves ...”

“We have not been created out of nothing, but from primeval "ur-matter," atoms formed billions of years ago that have for a brief while been gathered into collections that think they are us.”