Albert Camus

“O light! This the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.”

“There is but one true philosophical problem and that is suicide.”

“He had loved is mother and his child, everything that it was not up to him to choose. And after all he, who had challenged everything, questioned everything, 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, his illness, his vocation, fame or poverty--in a word, his star. 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. The heart, the heart above all is not free. It is inevitability and the recognition of the inevitable. And he, in truth, had never wholeheartedly loved other than the inevitable. All that was left for him was to love his own death.”

“Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses...”

“When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling.Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.”

“today he felt life, youth, people slipping away from him, without being able to hold on to any of them, left with the blind hope that this obscure force that for so many years had raised him above the daily routine, nourished him unstintingly, and been equal to the most difficult circumstances--that, as it had with endless generosity given him reason to live, it would also give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion.”

“Squeezed against each other in the heavy heat, they were silent...looking toward the home that was expecting them--quiet, perspiring, resigned to this existence divided among a soulless job, long trips coming and going in an uncomfortable trolley, and at the end an abrupt sleep. On some evenings it would sadden Jacques to look at them. Until then he had only known the riches and the joys of poverty. 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.”

“They went on living in poverty, though they were no longer in need, but they were set in their ways, and they looked on life with a resigned suspicion; they loved it as animals do, but they knew from experience that it would regularly give birth to disaster without even showing any sign that it was carrying it.”

“They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.”

“I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.”

“Once one's up against it, the precise manner of one's death has obviously small importance.”

“In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.”

“If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it. (as quoted by Tony Judt)”

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

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

“stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves”

“The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. 'Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.'This perked me up a little. I said I had been looking at the stones in these walls for months. There wasn't anything or anyone in the world I knew better. Maybe at one time, way back, I had searched for a face in them. But the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire—and it belonged to Marie.”

“A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.”

“A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.”

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

“And then came human beings; humans wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to.”

“But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.”

“You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You're judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don't like the sentence.”

“L'habitude du desepoir est pire que le desespoir lui-meme.”

“The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.”

“Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents”

“You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them.”

“The world I live in is loathsome to me, but I feel one with the men who suffer in it”

“Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”

“We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.”

“At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.”

“Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.”

“maybe she had become tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occured to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen. [...] Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead.”

“I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else.”

“We are all born mad, some remain so”

“Je ne sais plus si je vis ou si je me souviens.”

“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.”

“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”

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can't be sure.”

“In normal times all of us know, whether consciously or not, that there is no love which can't be bettered; nevertheless, we reconcile ourselves more or less easily to the fact that ours has never risen above the average.”

“Heureux les coeurs qui peuvent plier car ils ne seront jamais brisés. Sont-ils si heureux que ça. Un coeur qui ne se brise pas ne peut pas guérir si on ne connait ni l'épreuve ni la guérisson on n'apprend rien et si l'on n'apprend rien on ne change pas. Mais les épreuves et les changements font partie de la vie. Tous les coeurs devraient-ils être brisés?”

“From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all. But whether or not one can live with one's passions, whether or not one can accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt - that is the whole question.”

“A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is "dense", sensing to what a degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia.”

“Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart - that is where it must be sought.”

“A partir du moment où elle est reconnue, l'absurdité est une passion, la plus déchirante de toutes.”

“Au fond des prisons, le rêve est sans limites, la réalité ne freine rien.”

“Ceci n'ira pas sans de terribles conséquences, dont nous ne connaissons encore que quelques-unes.”

“Ce qu'on appelle une raison de vivre est en même temps une excellente raison de mourir.”

“Ce monde, tel qu'il est fait, n'est pas supportable. J'ai donc besoin de la lune, ou du bonheur, ou de l'immortalité, de quelque chose qui soit dément peut-être, mais qui ne soit pas de ce monde.”

“Créer, c'est vivre deux fois.”