Quotes

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

Is it absurd to imagine that our social behavior, from amoeba to man, is also planned and dictated, from stored information, by the cells? And that the time has come for men to be entrusted with the task, through heroic efforts, of bringing life to other worlds?

Looking back 25 years later, what I may say is that the facts have been far better than the dreams. In the long course of cell life on this earth it remained, for our age for our generation, to receive the full ownership of our inheritance.

For over two billion years, through the apparent fancy of her endless differentiations and metamorphosis the Cell, as regards its basic physiological mechanisms, has remained one and the same. It is life itself, and our true and distant ancestor.

The cell, over the billions of years of her life, has covered the earth many times with her substance, found ways to control herself and her environment, and insure her survival.

When I went to the University, the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life, its nature, its origins, and its ills.

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.