The Rebel

They are intermediaries. But it is impossible to rediscover or sustain them throughout the entire process.

Great suffering and great happiness may be found at the beginning of any process of reasoning

an attitude on the basis of a specially selected emotion.

is obviously impossible to formulate

In a certain way, the absurd, which claims to express man in his solitude, really makes him live in front of a

mirror. And then the initial anguish runs the risk of turning to comfort. The wound that is scratched with such solicitude ends by giving pleasure.

In actual fact, this form of reasoning assures us at the same time that we can kill and that we cannot kill. It abandons us in this contradiction with no grounds either for preventing or for justifying murder, menacing and menaced, swept along with a whole generation intoxicated by nihilism, and yet lost in loneliness, with weapons in our hands and a lump in our throats.

The moment that we recognize the impossibility of absolute negation—and merely to be alive is to recognize this—the very first thing that cannot be denied is the right of others to live.

Here suicide and murder are two aspects of a single system, the system of a misguided intelligence that prefers, to the suffering imposed by a limited situation, the dark victory in which heaven and earth are annihilated.

Evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice.