Albert Camus

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing."

"I know of only one duty, and that is to love."

"I cannot stand the company of men. They flatter or they judge. I can stand neither of the two."

"It is necessary to fall in love – the better to provide an alibi for all the despair we are going to feel anyway."

"Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness."

"Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine."

"“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”"

"When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

"...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves."

"“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”"

"Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom."

"If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one."

"Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny."

"If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man."

"Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are."