Albert Camus Quotes

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

"Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority."

@thisisbiryani Carnet IV, Carnets II: janvier 1942-mars 1951

@Quotes_Camus Which book is this from?

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

“But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.”

“No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.”

“Thus each of us had to be content to lie only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.”

“How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views?”

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

"If there is one thing one can always yearn for and sometimes attain, it is human love."

"Once plague had shut the gates of the town, they had settled down to a life of separation, debarred from the living warmth that gives forgetfulness of all."

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

"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."

"No, Father. I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day, I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture."

"Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I'd no concern with you people. But now that I've seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody's business."

"There's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is — common decency."

"What's true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you'd need to be a madman, or a coward, or stone blind, to give in tamely to the plague."

"The public lacked, in short, standards of comparison. It was only as time passed and the steady rise in the death-rate could not be ignored that public opinion became alive to the truth."

"He knew quite well that it was plague and, needless to say, he also knew that, were this to be officially admitted, the authorities would be compelled to take very drastic steps. This was, of course, the explanation of his colleagues' reluctance to face the facts."

"We tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away."

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise."

"No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all."