Albert Camus, طاعون Quotes
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.
Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents
A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it.
The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all - he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.
A liking for truth at any cost is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing resists. It's a vice, at times a comfort, or a selfishness.
Germany collapsed as a result of having engaged in a struggle for empire with the concepts of provincial politics.
The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
What will be left of the power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?
My great idea is that we must forgive the Pope. First of all, he needs it more than anyone else. Besides, it is the only way of placing oneself above him.
The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
To live is to hurt others, and through others, to hurt oneself. Cruel earth! How can we manage not to touch anything? To find what ultimate exile?
Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will's impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.
Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning
How many crimes are permitted simply because their authors could not endure being wrong.
If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.
If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.
I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.
Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears.
