At 30 A Man Should Know Himself

…there's No Question Of Heroism In All This. It's A Matter Of Common Decency. That's An Idea Which May Make Some People Smile, But The Only Means Of Fighting A Plague Is - Common Decency.

[love] Is The Type Of Disease That Spares Neither The Intelligent Nor The Idiotic.

What Can A Meaning Outside My Condition Mean To Me? I Can Understand Only In Human Terms. What I Touch, What Resists Me - That 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 I Lack And Which Means Nothing Within The Limits Of My Conditions?

All That Remains Is A Fate Whose Outcome Alone Is Fatal. Outside Of That Single Fatality Of Death, Everything, Joy Or Happiness, Is Liberty. A World Remains Of Which Man Is The Sole Master. What Bound Him Was The Illusion Of Another World. The Outcome Of His Thought, Ceasing To Be Renunciatory, Flowers In Images. It Frolics---in Myths, To Be Sure, But Myths With No Other Depth Than That Of Human Suffering And, Like It, Inexhaustible. Not The Divine Fable That Amuses And Blinds, But The Terrestrial Face, Gesture, And Drama In Which Are Summed Up A Difficult Wisdom And An Ephemeral Passion.

Nature Is A Burning And Frigid, Transparent And Limited Universe In Which Nothing Is Possible But Everything Is Given.