Albert Camus, طاعون Quotes

In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.

No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.

To stay or to go, it amounted to the same thing.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.

For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.

I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.

To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.

Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn't desire is the hardest thing in the world.

Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.

I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.

There is only one class of men, the privileged class

Existence is illusory and it is eternal.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.

For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.

Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.

The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.

I'd have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.

As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.

All I know of morality I learned from football

Freedom is the right to never have to lie.

At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.

No ends, simply means.

What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?

For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.

For the absurd man, it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one's own world, which comes to the same thing).

Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses.

Why must one love rarely to love well?

Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath.

Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.

Give up the tyranny of female charm.

Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. If God did exist, we should have to abolish Him.

I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.

Some are created to love, while the others - to live.

Without freedom there is no art.

Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.

Je puis nier une chose sans me croire obligé de la salir ou de retirer aux autres le droit d'y croire.

We're all special cases.

At times I feel myself overtaken by an immense tenderness for these people around me who live in the same century.

Don't let them tell us stories.

Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.

Everybody knows life isn't worth living.

I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.

Friendship is not so simple. It is hard to get and takes a long time, but when one ha it one cannot get rid of it, one has to face it.

The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand.

But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.