Quotes to inspire and reflect

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier . Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday. L’Étranger (The Stranger) pt. 1, ch. 1 (1942)

[ Of the Black Death :] How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world!

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.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origin, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

As generations come and go, / Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; / Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, / And feeble, of themselves, decay.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words.

A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.

Blood's thicker than water, and when one’s in trouble / Best to seek out a relative’s open arms.

Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents’ belief in phrenology seems now to us.

We can t do without dominating others or being served. ... Even the man on the bottom rung still has his wife, or his child. If he’s a bachelor, his dog. The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.

Someday, before we all die, perhaps I shall get from home a letter in which all the news will be pleasant. 1 never have thus far.

Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

Everything disturbs an absent lover.

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.

Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; / And every little absence is an age.

Those who are absent, by its means become present; it [mail] is the consolation of life.

’Tis sweet to think, that, where’er we rove, / We are sure to find something blissful and dear, / And that, when we re far from the lips we love, / We’ve but to make love to the lips we are near.

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.

When you are in Rome you long to be in the country, and when you are in the country you praise the distant town to the skies.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate.

I know with certainty that a man s work is nothing but the long journey to recover, through the detours of art, the two or three simple and great images which first gained access to his heart.

After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we’d never be done with it.

The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

How great love is, presence best trial makes, / But absence tries how long this love will be.

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.

Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to slaves.

Love all love of other sights controls, and makes one little room an everywhere.

'Honour thy father and thy mother' stands written among the three laws of most revered righteousness.

Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in life.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Your travel life has the aspect of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing... But you are like the Vikings who have gone into a world of adventure, and home is not home until you return.

I thought I told you to wait in the car.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means.

True friendship is seen through the heart, not through the eyes.