“Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.” - Albert Camus

The evil that is in the world almost 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 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. The soul of a murderer is blind: and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

One cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.

“I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.” 

Albert Camus

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains? “Yes,” I said.

“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”

Albert Camus, The First Man

“To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.” 

Albert Camus

“To lose one’s life is no great matter; when the time comes I’ll have the courage to lose mine. But what’s intolerable is to see one’s life being drained of meaning, to be told there’s no reason for existing. A man can’t live without some reason for living.”

Albert Camus, Caligula

Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

All human unhappiness comes from the hope.

Why should we rarely love for love much?

“I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.”

Albert Camus, The Stranger

“The absurd hero’s refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.”

Albert Camus