Albert Camus, طاعون Quotes

The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.

The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

Once in the midst of a seemingly endless winter, I discovered within myself an invincible spring.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

There are more things to admire in men than to despise.

The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.

We are rebels for a cause, poets with a dream , and we won't let this world die without a fight.

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.

These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.

I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.

The only conception of freedom I can have is that of the prisoner or the individual in the midst of the State. The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject.

Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose a future.

Everything is true, and nothing is true!

In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day.

The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.

Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.

What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.

And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

Fate is not in man but around him

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.

When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day.

This is the century of fear.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one's landlady.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

There are plagues, and there are victims, and it's the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.

Art does not tolerate reason.

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.

In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

There are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.

Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.

Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.

The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.