Albert Camus - The Plague (1947)

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By giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men.

Albert Camus
A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away.

Albert Camus
"What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?"
"I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps."
"Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?"
"Comprehension."

Albert Camus
In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.

Albert Camus
There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.

Albert Camus
The important thing isn't the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.

Albert Camus
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.

Albert Camus
But when a man has had only four hours' sleep he isn't sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.

Albert Camus
Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world.

Albert Camus
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

Albert Camus
What we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

Albert Camus
How hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!

Albert Camus
It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.

Albert Camus
Thus, too, they came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

Albert Camus
There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.

Albert Camus
In Oran, as elsewhere, for want of time and thought, people have to love one another without knowing it.

Albert Camus
Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

Albert Camus
After a short silence the doctor raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace. "Yes, he replied. "The path of sympathy.

Albert Camus
He tried to recall what he had read about the disease. Figures floated across his memory, and he recalled that some thirty or so great plagues known to history had accounted for nearly a hundred million deaths. 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 actually sees him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.

Albert Camus
They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.

Albert Camus
Can one be a saint without God?, that's the problem, in fact the only problem, I'm up against today.

Albert Camus
Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.

Albert Camus
When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though the war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.

Albert Camus
Query: How to 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 a Sunday afternoon; by travelling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by queueing at the box-office of theatres and then not booking a seat.

Albert Camus
Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.

Albert Camus
Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.

Albert Camus