It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world. - Simone de Beauvoir

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

It was a lovely autumn day with a blue sky: I made my way through a lead-coloured world, and I realized that my mother’s accident was affecting me far more than I had thought it would. I could not really see why. It had wrenched her out of the framework, the role, the set of images in which I had imprisoned her: I recognized her in this patient in bed, but I did not recognize either the pity or the kind of disturbance that she aroused in me.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.