Albert Camus, طاعون Quotes

Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in an action, can avoid committing murder.

One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it

As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.

Stupidity has a knack for getting its way.

In medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions

We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.

How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.

And just then it crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire—and it would come to absolutely the same thing.

We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.

Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation.

[Camus] "The meaning if my works: so many men are deprived of mercy. How to live without mercy? One must try and do what Christianity never did: to take care of the damned.

...luck is not to be coerced.

There is something divine in mindless beauty.

You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.

There is not love of life without despair about life.

I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgement it takes place every day.

The struggle to the top is in itself enough to fulfill the human heart. Sisyphus should be regarded as happy.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.

Beauty is unbearable drives us to despair offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

Life is the sum of all your choices.

We are not certain we are never certain.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worst.

If there is a sin against life it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.

Psychology is action not thinking about oneself.

To be happy we must not be too concerned with others.

The innocent is the person who explains nothing.

The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward but he who has hope for it is a fool.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage then to their disadvantage.

Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value and its face of eter1nal youth.

In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

An intense feeling carries with it its own universe magnificent or wretched as the case may be.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness.

At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all accept these things.

Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.

To know oneself one should assert oneself.

At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all accept these things.

If after all men cannot always make history have a meaning they can always act so that their own lives have one.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays it is the only desert within our reach.

There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.

There is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend they shall never be broken.

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.