Albert Camus, طاعون Quotes

For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.

All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.

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

It is easier to kill what we do not know.

Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.

But what does it mean, the plague? It's life, that's all.

Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture.

Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.

For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.

Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?

I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray.

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

Men are never really willing to die except for the sake of freedom: therefore they do not believe in dying completely.

One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.

To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.

He had opened his heart to the sublime indifference of the universe

To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.

Rule: Start by looking for what is valid in every man.

Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.

My life was lucky so that I met, I loved (and disappointed) only outstanding people.

Old women even forget how to love their sons. The heart gets worn out, Monsieur.

The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.

A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.

A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them.

Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.

As for those whose role it is to love us - I mean, relatives and in-laws (what a word)- It's a different tune. They find the right word, but it's usually the one that wounds.

On my way out I was even going to shake his hand, but I remembered just in time that I'd killed a man.

The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically , expresses an aspiration for order .

Without work all life goes rotten.

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.

There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.

I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.

You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.

Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate

To remain a man in today's world, one must have not only unfailing energy and unwavering intensity, one must also have a little luck.

Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.