Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies...

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.

Ah, this dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of what we are capable.

He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to...

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

The only picture of Tarrou he would always have would be the picture of a man who firmly gripped the steering-wheel of his car when driving, or else the picture of that stalwart body, now lying motionless. Knowing meant that: a living warmth, and a picture of death.

L’automne est un deuxième ressort où chaque feuille est une fleur.

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

Pregunta: ,qué hacer para no perder el tiempo?Respuesta: sentirlo en toda su lentitud. Medios: pasarse los días en la antesala de un dentista en una silla inconfortable; vivir el domingo en el balcón, por la tarde; oír conferencias en una lengua que no se conoce; escoger los itinerarios del tren más largos y menos cómodos...

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

Penser, c’est réapprendre à voir, à être attentif, c’est diriger sa conscience, c’est faire de chaque idée et de chaque image, à la façon de Proust, un lieu privilégié

Sans doute, rien n’est plus naturel, aujourd’hui, que de voir des gens travailler du matin au soir et choisir ensuite de perdre aux cartes, au café, et en bavardages, le temps qui leur reste pour vivre.

How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: ‘A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That’s all I want of it.

Je réclame l’indépendance dans l’interdépendance.

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

Mas, no que se refere a este tribunal, a virtude negativa da toler ncia deve transformar-se na virtude menos fácil, mas mais elevada, da justiça. Sobretudo, quando o vazio de um coração, assim como o que descobrimos neste homem, se torna um abismo onde a sociedade pode sucumbir. […] Ainda na opinião dele, um homem...

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...

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

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

Ot minderimle kerevet tahtası arasında sanki kumaşa yapışmış nerdeyse saydamlaşmış bir gazete parçası buldum. Geçmiş bir polis olayını anlatıyordu. Baş tarafı yoktu. Ama, olay herhalde Çekoslovakya’da geçmiş olmalıydı. Adamın biri para kazanmak için bir Çek köyünden ayrılmış. Yirmi beş yıl sonra, zengin olarak, karısı ve bir çocuğuyle birlikte köyüne dönmüş. Annesi kız kardeşiyle birlikte, doğduğu...

Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death.

The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d...

He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen – and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!

Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.

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.

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

Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep

An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. “Can they be brought together?” This is a practical question. We must get down to it. “I despise intelligence” really means: “I cannot bear...

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

Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these, Tarrou may have been one of them, had desired reunion with something they couldn’t have defined, but which...

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...

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

Don’t walk in front of me I may not follow:Don’t behind me I may not lead:Just walk beside me a be my friend.

…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?

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

In vain a zealous evangelist with a fely hat and flowing tie threads his way through the crowd, crying without cease: ‘God is great and good. Come unto Him.’ On the contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more immediate interest than God.

I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: “Close the window, it’s too beautiful.

J’écoutais mon cœur. Je ne pouvais imaginer que ce bruit qui m’accompagnait depuis si longtemps pût jamais cesser.

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...

In the long run one gets used to anything.

… 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.

As he himself said, “I will prove it to you, gentlemen, and i will prove it in two ways. First in the blinding clarity of the facts, and second, in the dim light cast by the mind of his criminal soul.

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

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?

O absurdo é essencialmente um divórcio. Não está num nem outro dos elementos comparados. Nasce do seu confronto.

Under the fatal lighting of that destiny, its uselessness becomes evident. No code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.

You see, I’ve heard of a man whose friend had been imprisoned and who slept on the floor of his room every night in order not to enjoy a comfort of which his friend had been deprived.