“What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?”

“What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny,what I cannot reject—this is what counts. I can negate everythingof that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desirefor unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. Ican refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends orenraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and thisdivine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t knowwhether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I knowthat I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for mejust now to know it. What can a meaning outside my conditionmean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch,what resists me—that is what I understand. And these twocertainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and theimpossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonableprinciple—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What othertruth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lackand which means nothing within the limits of my condition?”

“Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.”

“A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?”

“If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if I admit that my freedom has no meaning except in relation to its limited fate, then I must say that what counts is not the best living but the most living.”

“I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. ”

“Here I understand what is meant by glory: the right to love without limits.”