"For all those landscapes, those flowers and those plowed fields, the oldest of lands, show you every spring that there are things you cannot choke in blood."

"It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners."

"A writer cannot serve today those who make history, he must serve those who are subject to it."

"Men are convinced of your arguments, your sincerity, and the seriousness of your efforts only by your death."

"It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life."

"In raining bullets on those silent faces, already turned away from this world, you think you are disfiguring the face of our truth."

"Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them."

"I didn't like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea."

"For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment's human suffering."

"At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things."

"In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death... these are things that unite us all."

"He doesn't play the game ... He refuses to lie. Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. But Meursault, contrary to appearances, doesn't want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened."

"We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them."

"As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world- and finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I'd been happy, and that I was still happy. For the final consummation and for me to feel less lonely, my last wish was that there should be a crowd of spectators at my execution and that they should greet me with cries of hatred."

"When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."

"She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart."

"Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part."

"After awhile you could get used to anything."

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

"There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn."

"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children."

"You cannot create experience. You must undergo it."

"Query: How 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 of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn't know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth."

"Having money is a way of being free of money."

"But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?"

"February 13, 1936I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps...Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself."

"What is a rebel? A man who says no."

"How unbearable, for women, is the tenderness which a man can give them without love. For men, how bittersweet this is."

"Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions."

"A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images."

"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."

"Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself."

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

"If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent."

"It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, in other words to silence."

"The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm."

"If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one."

"To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today."

"But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law."

"If there is a sin against life it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

"We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage."

"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself."

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is."

"At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it."

"In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself - limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist."

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

"I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don't really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a woman's bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise?"

"It is normal to give away a little of one's life in order not to lose it all."

"Do you believe in God, doctor?"No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original."