Albert Camus, طاعون Quotes

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

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.

Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.

To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.

What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.

I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.

Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we'd never be done with it.

Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.

Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.

Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.

It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.

They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.

Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

Even when one sits in the prisoner's dock, it is interesting to hear talk about oneself.

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.

Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.

They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

In the world today, only a philosophy of eternity could justify non-violence.

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful

There is no love of life without despair of life.

When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.

I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.

... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.

What the world requires of the Christians is that they should continue to be Christians.

I know [my label], in any case: a double face, a charming Janus, and underneath, the house motto: "Be wary". On my business cards:"Jean-Baptiste Clamence, actor".

I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.

The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art

Liberty is the right not to lie.

People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.

Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences-all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.

How hard it is, how bitter it is to become a man!

Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.

We [writers] must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.

We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.

Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.

There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

what doesn't kill you make you stronger and stronger