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What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.

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Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

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The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the wh...more

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An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the ...more

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I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two.

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I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless.

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I knew a man who gave twenty years of his life to a scatterbrained woman, sacrificing everything to her, his friendships, his work, the very respectab...more

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It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway.

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There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn.

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Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

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If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.

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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...more

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There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide.

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Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.