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To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
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I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
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Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
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Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.
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If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.
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To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.
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Integrity has no need of rules.
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Am well. Thinking of you always. Love.
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It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking. He must create if he can, first and foremost, especially if his creation does not side-step the problems of his time.
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To begin with, poor people´s memory is less nourished than that of a rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time throughtout lives that are grey and featureless.
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In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
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Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?" "Yes," I said.
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Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.
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The revolutionary government was required to become the government of the war.
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Knowing what Christ knew , knowing all about mankind--ah! who would have thought that the crime is not so much to make others die, but to die oneself--confronted day and night with his innocent crime, it became too difficult to go on. It was better to get it over with, to not defend himself, to die, in order not to be the only one to have survived, and to go elsewhere, where, perhaps, he would be supported.
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But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.
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In every guilty man, there is some innocence. This makes every absolute condemnation revolting.
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The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it.
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Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.
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The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.
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Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.
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Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
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Men die and they are not happy.
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At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.