Albert Camus

"I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man."

"But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination."

"It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy."

"Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead Walk beside me… just be my friend"

"…. Query: How contrive not to waste one's time?Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one's days on an uneasy chair in a dentist's waiting-room; by remaining on one's balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth."

"Every achievement is a servitude. It compels us to a higher achievement."

"Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?"

"...since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?"

"Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions."

"The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours."

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

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."

"որևէ քաղաք ճանաչելու ամենաճիշտ ձևերից մեկն էլ իմանալն է, թե ինչպե՞ս են այնտեղ աշխատում, ինչպե՞ս են սիրում, և ինչպե՞ս են մեռնում:"

"Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat. But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can an armistice for a mother bereaved of a son or for a man who buries his friend."

"Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it."

"… I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger."

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

"Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable."

"It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money."

"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."