“Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power…Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.”

When religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.

God cannot be sensed as a second thought, as an explanation of the origin of the universe. He is either the first and the last, or just another concept.

He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.

There is a war to wage against the vulgar, the glorification of the absurd, a war that is incessant, universal.

God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.

Mundus vult decipi’—the world wants to be deceived.

I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder.

Faith is an awareness of divine mutuality and companionship, a form of communion between God and man.

To sense a ray of God’s radiance in the jungles of history.

Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.

Few are guilty, but all are responsible.

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

Man has indeed become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of his needs.

The self is not the hub but the spoke of the revolving wheel. It is precisely the function of prayer to shift the center of living from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.

Self-sufficiency, independence, the capacity to stand apart, to differ, to resist, and to defy-all are modes of being human.

The absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception.

Wit is a pleasure-giving thing, largely because it eludes reason; but in the apprehension of an absurdity through the working of the comic spirit there is a foundation of reason, and an impetus to human companionship.

People who cannot recognize a palpable absurdity are very much in the way of civilization.

Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It’s a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.

This may be the vocation of man: to say “Amen” to being and to the Author of being; to live in defiance of absurdity, notwithstanding futility and defeat; to attain faith in God even in spite of God.

Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And I knew that it was better to live out one’s absurdity than to die for that of others.