The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

• Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
• The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
• Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
• A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
• Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
• A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
• Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
• Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
• After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
• There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.