580 quotes found
“But memory is less disposed to compromise”
“Tarrou had "lost the match," as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of know...”
“What I'm sure of," he began, "is that you can't be happy without money. That's all. I don't like superficiality and I don't like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I've noticed is that t...”
“I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without bo...”
“Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to th...”
“The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. 'Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish...”
“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 br...”
“...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...”
“Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.”
“I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to 'LIllustration. Something desperate, you know."Zagreus smiled. "You're a poor man, Mersault. That explains half of your disgust...”
“the evil that is in this 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 ...”
“I explained to him, however, that my nature was such that my physical needs often got in the way of my feelings.”
“If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.”
“Beyond the curve of his days he glimpsed neither superhuman happiness nor eternity--happiness was human, eternity ordinary.”
“The evil that is in the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. One the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, i...”
“Don't lies in the end put us on the path to truth? And don't my stories, true or false, point to the same conclusion? Don't they have the same meaning? So, what does it matter whether they are true...”
“I didn’t like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.”
“At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick o...”
“It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, in other words to silence.”
“This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that itexists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest isconstruction. For if I try to se...”
