Albert Camus, طاعون Quotes

I love life - that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.

A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.

We can't do without dominating others or being served.... The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.

Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.

Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.

Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.

From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.

The struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL.

Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.

So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.

Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.

... it is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is difficult for me to die.

There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

You know, [women] do not really condemn any weakness: rather, they try to humiliate or disarm our strengths. That is why women arethe reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal.

I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.

I understood, by dint of digging into my memories, that modesty helped me to shine, humility helped me to triumph and virtue to oppress.

It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.

One grows out of pity when it's useless.

The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it

Il y a dans les hommes plus de choses a' admirer que de choses a' me priser. There are more things to admire in people than to despise.

but perhaps we should love what we cannot understand

I don't want to represent man as he is, but only as he might be.

The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.

The temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.

And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.

In truth, I was so good at being a man, with such plenitude and simplicity, that I thought I was something of a superman.

I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself.

After awhile you could get used to anything.

That's love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.

We all have a weakness for beauty.

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.

To lose the touch of flowers and women's hands is the supreme separation.

You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us

The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.

The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.

They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.

A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.

I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints.

“To think the way you do,” he said smiling, “you have to be a man who lives either on a tremendous despair, or on a tremendous hope.” “On both, perhaps.”

I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored

Men cry because things are not what they ought to be.

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

Ironic philosophies produce passionate works.