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Generally, I like all islands. There, it is easier to rule.
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For me, physical love has always been bound to an irresistible feeling of innocence and joy. Thus, I cannot love in tears but in exaltation.
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The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.
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We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.
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I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head.
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There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.
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Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
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Paris is dirty. It has pigeons and black yards. The people have white skin.
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I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.
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These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
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You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.
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You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.
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The more I produce, the less I am certain. On the road along which the artist walks, night falls ever more densely. Finally, he dies blind.
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One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
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Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.
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I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
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Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.
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Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.
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But do you know why we are always more just and generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short.
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We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.
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But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.
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Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
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So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.
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Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him, and struggle with all our might against death without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?