“Deepest thoughts and major works eventually become insignificant.”

“Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.”

“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.”

“I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.”

“To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”

“Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. Anddiversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mindis that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of itsimpending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of thework and of life. Detached from it, the work will once more give abarely muffled voice to a soul Forever freed from hope. Or it willgive voice to nothing if the creator, tired of his activity, intends toturn away. That is equivalent.”

“Rieux knew what the old man was thinking at that moment as he wept, and he thought the same: that this world without love was like a dead world and that there always comes a time when one grows tired of prisons, work and courage, and years for the face of another human being and the wondering, affectionate heart.”