Albert Camus

“When I see a new face, something sets off an alarm bell inside me. 'slow down! Danger!' Even when the attraction is strongest, I am on my guard.”

“Jacques avait dévoré les livres qui lui tombaient sous la main et les avalait avec la même avidité qu’il mettait à vivre, à jouer, à rêver.”

“O zaman sık sık düşünüyor ve içimden: Beni kuru bir ağaç kovuğunda yaşamaya zorlasalardı da gökyüzüne bakmaktan başka bir işim olmasaydı, yavaş yavaş buna da alışır giderdim, diyordum.”

“On ne comprend pas le destin et c'est pourquoi je me suis fait destin.”

“With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If only the significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be he history of its successive regrets and its impotences.”

“Mutluluk bir yerde ve her yerde, hiçbir şey beklemeden dünyayı, insanları sevmektir.”

“The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.”

“As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”

“Yes, I know what passion would fill me with all its power. Before, I was too young. I got in the way. Now I know that acting and loving and suffering is living, of course, but it’s only living insofar as you can be transparent and accept your fate, like the unique reflection of a rainbow of joys and passions which is the same for everyone.”

“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”

“The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.”

“You alone will know why I killed myself. You know my principles. I hate those who commit suicide. Besause of what they do TO OTHERS. If you have to do it, you must disguise it. Out of kindness.”

“On some evenings it would sadden Jacques to look at them (workers). Until then he had only known the riches and the joys of poveryy. But now heat and boredom and fatigue were showing him their curse, the curse of work so stupid you could weep and so interminably monotonous that it made the days too long and, at the same time, life too short.”

“And for all his life it would be kindness and love that made him cry, never pain or persecution, which on the contrary only reinforced his spirit and his resolution.”

“once I admitted the arguments of necessity and force majeure put forward by the less eminent, I couldn’t reject those of the eminent. To which they retorted that the surest way of playing the game of the red robes was to leave to them the monopoly of the death penalty. My reply to this was that if you gave in once, there was no reason for not continuing to give in. It seems to me that history has borne me out; today there’s a sort of competition who will kill the most. They’re all mad over murder and they couldn’t stop killing men even if they wanted to.”

“Didžios mintys ateina į pasaulį balandžių kojytėmis. Tad galbūt įtempę klausą išgirsime imperijų ir tautų šurmulyje lengvą sparnų šnarėjimą - švelnų gyvenimo ir vilties bruzdesį.”

“I felt as I hadn't felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I'd realized how all these people loathed me.”

“The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.”

“Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus's motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening's slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old-heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon.”

“For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.”

“It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.”

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”

“Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.”

“Ce n'est pas qu'on soit mauvais homme, mais on perd la lumière.”

“Je n'ai plus d'amis, je n'ai que des complices. En revanche, leur nombre a augmenté, ils sont le genre humain, vous le premier. Celui qui est là est toujours le premier.”

“Fais servir alors ton pouvoir à mieux aimer ce qui peut l'être encore.”

“Ils parlent pour ne pas s'écouter. S'ils s'écouteraient, ils sauraient qu'ils ne sont rien et ne pourraient plus parler.”

“Compter la vie pour rien, quand on tient l'argent pour tout.”

“Gouverner, c'est voler. Tout le monde sait ça.”

“Je ne suis pas son confident, je suis son spectateur. C'est plus sage.”

“J'ai connu un homme qui a donné vingt ans de sa vie à une étourdie, qui lui a tout sacrifié, ses amitiés, son travail, la décence même de sa vie, et qui reconnut un soir qu'il ne l'avait jamais aimée. Il s'ennuiyait, voilà tout, il s'ennuiyait, comme la plupart des gens. Il s'était donc créé de toutes pièces une vie de complications et de drames. Il faut que quelque chose arrive, voilà l'explication de la plupart des engagements humains.”

“L'homme est ainsi, cher monsieur, il a deux faces : il ne peut pas aimer sans s'aimer.”

“J'étais à l'aise en tout, il est vrai, mais en même temps satisfait de rien. Chaque joie m'en faisait désirer une autre.”

“Je ne pouvais rencontrer un homme d'esprit sans qu'aussitôt j'en fisse ma société.”

“Quand on a beaucoup médité sur l'homme, par métier ou par vocation, il arrive qu'on éprouve de la nostalgie pour les primates. Ils n'ont pas, eux, d'arrière-pensées.”

“La vérité est que tout homme intelligent, vous le savez bien, rêve d'être un gangster et de régner sur la société par la seule violence. Comme ce n'est pas aussi facile que veut bien le faire croire la lecture des romans spécialisés, on s'en remet généralement à la politique et l'on court au parti le plus cruel.”

“I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.”

“I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself.”

“Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.”

“what doesn't kill you make you stronger and stronger”

“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”

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

“The act of love is a confession.”

“No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing. ”

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

“Whereas during those months of separation time had never gone quickly enough for their liking and they were wanting to speed its flight, now that they were in sight of the town they would have liked to slow it down and hold each moment in suspense, once the breaks went on and the train was entering the station. For the sensation, confused perhaps, but none the less poingant for that, of all those days and weeks and months of life lost to their love made them vaguely feel they were entitled to some compensation; this present hour of joy should run at half the speed of those long hours of waiting.”

“He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

“He had never loved anything except what was inevitable. The people fate had imposed on him, the world as it appeared to him, everything in his life he had not been able to avoid...For the rest, for everything he had to choose, he made himself love, which is not the same thing. No doubt he had known the feeling of wonderment, passion, and even moments of tenderness. But each moment had sent him on to other moments, each person to others, and he had loved nothing he had chosen, except what was little by little imposed on him by circumstance, had lasted as much by accident as by intention, and finally became necessary: Jessica.”

“What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.”

“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.”