Quotes by Albert Camus

When a man has learned how to remain alone with his suffering, how to overcome his longing to flee, then he has little left to learn.

I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in the regard to all the for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority–like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner–it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time and practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.

What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me--that is what I understand. And these two certainties--my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle--I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope which I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?

Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.

Who taught you all this, doctor?The reply came promptly:Suffering.

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 wasnt 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.

I know positively… that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a 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 a 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… 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, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free, except death.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

The literal meaning of life is whatever youre doing that prevents you from killing yourself.

Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are myrevolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity ofconsciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitationto death—and I refuse suicide.

The mind, when it reaches its limits, must make a judgment and choose its conclusions. This is where suicide and the reply stand.

Is one to die voluntarily or to hope in spite of everything?

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

Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.

I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it is a fact one doesnt come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. Thats why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victims side, so as to reduce the damage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how on attains to the third category; in other words, to peace.

We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to LIllustration. Something desperate, you know.Zagreus smiled. Youre a poor man, Mersault. That explains half of your disgust. And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.

People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels.

Fate is not in man but around him