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A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
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Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
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A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
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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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We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives... inside ourselves.
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How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
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Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
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A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
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The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
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To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
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Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
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After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
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To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
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Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
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As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
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The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
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Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
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I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live my life as if there isn’t and die to find out there is.
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All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
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There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.