Albert Camus

“Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.”

“Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.”

“What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.”

“What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.”

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

“An endless defeat”

“I realized, through it all, that.. in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

“What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.”

“And those they love have forgotten them because all their energies are devoted to making schemes and taking steps to get them out of the camp. And by dint of always thinking about these schemes and steps they have ceased thinking about those whose release they’re trying to secure. And that, too, is natural enough. In fact, it comes to this: nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without letting one’s thoughts be diverted by anything - by meals, by a fly that settles on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always flies and itches. That’s why life is difficult to live.”

“We are not certain, we are never certain.”

“There are more things to admire in men then to despise.”

“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.”

“there was only one thing that interested her and that was getting into bed with men whenever she'd the chance. And I warned her straight. 'You'll be sorry one day, my girl, and wish you'd got me back'.”

“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.”

“It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning”

“The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.”

“The future is the only transcendental value for men without God.”

“Every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect.”

“Je m'ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.”

“Ils savaient maintenant que s'il est une chose qu'on puisse désirer toujours et obtenir quelquefois, c'est la tendresse humaine.”

“Hayat yaşamaya değmez. Aslına bakarsanız, insan ha otuzunda ölmüş ha yetmişinde, pek önemli değildi. Çünkü, her iki halde de pek doğal ki başka erkekler de başka kadınlar da yaşayacaklardı hem de binlerce yıl. Sözün kısası, hiçbir şey böylesine açık değildi. Şimdi de olsa yirmi yıl sonra da olsa yine bendim ölecek olan”

“VOINOV. — Comprendí que no bastaba denunciar la injusticia. Eramenester dar la vida para combatirla.”

“So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time.”

“Je vais vous dire un grand secret ... . N'attendez pas le Jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours.”

“Je puis nier une chose sans me croire obligé de la salir ou de retirer aux autres le droit d'y croire.”

“In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul”

“And I felt ready to live it all again too. 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. Finding it so much like myself – so like a brother, really – I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”

“In any case, the one man paved the way for the deeds of the other, in a sense foreshadowed and even legitimized by them.”

“Life is a sum of all your choices". So, what are you doing today?”

“I thought the traveler pretty much deserved what he got and that you should never play games.”

“I know positively - yes Rieux I can say I know the world inside out as no one on earth is free from it. And I know too that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in careless moment we breathe in somebody's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest- health integrity purity if you like - is a product of the human will of vigilance that must never falter. The good man the man who infects hardly anyone is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will-power a never ending tension of the mind to avoid such lapses. Yes Rieux it's a wearying business being plague-stricken. But it's still more wearying to refuse to be it. That's why everybody in the world today looks so tired everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us who want to get the plague out of their systems feel such desperate weariness a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.”

“As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, 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- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred.”

“What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.”

“There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.”

“Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.”

“People don't love each other at our age —they please each other, that's all. Later on when you're old and impotent, you can love somebody. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.”

“Come here, image.”

“he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...”

“Humans are creatures, who spent their lifes trying to convince themselves, that their existence is not absurd”

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

“Rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love.”

“man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified… Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonable desire and claims to give life a form it does not have.”

“Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience”

“every night, when he didn't want to be alone, or to age or die, with that set expression he assumed which she occasionally recognized on other men's faces, the only common expression of those madmen hiding under an appearance of wisdom until the madness seizes them and hurls them desperately toward a woman's body to bury in it, without desire, everything terrifying that solitude and night reveals to them.”

“Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.”

“We're going forward, but nothing changes.”

“How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A liking for the truth at all costs is a passion that spares nothing and that nothing can withstand.”

“My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.”

“But it's not easy, because friendship is absent-minded or at least powerless. It cannot achieve what it wants. Perhaps, after all, it doesn't want strongly enough. Perhaps we do not love life enough.”

“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.”