Albert Camus, طاعون Quotes

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

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

I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.

If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.

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

...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.

It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.

The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.

Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.

Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

The act of love is a confession.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

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

Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.

Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.

Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren't worse makes a failure of his or her life.

To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.

Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.

Art and revolt will die only with the last man.

Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.

Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.

In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly.

What is human in me is not what is best in me. What is human in me is that I desire, and to obtain what I desire, I believe I would crush anything that stood in my way.

A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing , but one who does not believe in what exists.

What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.

A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.

There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.

We have art in order not to die of life.

An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.

You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.

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

After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except promotion.

Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.

All healthy men have thought of their own suicide

Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.

We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood - never.

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