L.A. Paul Quotes

But I can't see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.

Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.

Much more likely you’ll hurt me. Still what does it matter? If I’ve got to suffer, it may as well be at your hands, your pretty hands.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

You're lucky. I'm always conscious of myself —in my mind. Painfully conscious.

Commitment is an act, not a word

My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

Only he who knows how to speak can be silent.

Man is fully responsible for his nature, choices and lifestyle.

This instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in and limits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream.

After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.

Perhaps it was a passing moment of madness after all. There is no trace of it any more. My odd feelings of the other week seem to me quite ridiculous today: I can no longer enter into them.

So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man, or something else to spoil your effects?""Yes, naturally.

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.

Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.

A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap. I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.

Existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.

[E]very man ought to say to himself, "Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?

...freedom only gives you something to be sorry for.

With older people, it's quite different. They're reliable, they show you what to do, and there's solidity in their affection.

I see the insipid flesh blossoming and palpitating with abandon.

Man lives in the midst of images. Literature offers him a critical image of himself.

He takes a few dazed steps, the waiters turn out the lights and he slips into unconsciousness: when this man is lonely he sleeps.

Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be...

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom—ah the soul-destroying boredom—of long days of mild content.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seeded refusal of that which others have made of us.

Once freedom lights its beacon in a man's heart the gods are powerless against him.

Once you hear the details of victory it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.

3 o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

When the rich wage war it's the poor who die.

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.

All human actions are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.

The best work is not what is most difficult for you it is what you do best.

Il pleure dans mon coeurComme il pleut sur la ville.Tears are shed in my heart like the rain on the town.

How you die out in me:down to the lastworn-out knot of breathyou're there, with a splinter of life.

It may be considered folly by common opinion but this refusal to destroy life unnecessarily, this reverence for it, must become a deeply implanted part of his ethical standard.

When he said someone had 'died", Erdős meant that that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left", the person had died.

Mathematician need only peace of mind and occasionally, paper and pencil.

And, in the endThe love you takeis equal to the love you make.

I've come to know that what we want in life is the greatest indication of who we really are.

Too many people spend too much time trying to perfect something before they actually do it. Instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you go, and fix it along the way…

There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.

Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?

The ethos of redemption is realized in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.

Une philosophie doit etre portative.