"In the long run one gets used to anything."

"There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy."

"This is the century of fear."

"Don't wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day."

"We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help."

"To create is to live twice."

"If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance."

"What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed."

"In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist."

"Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult."

"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, 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 that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill."

"Integrity has no need of rules."

"It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration."

"I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject."

"What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying."

"This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity."

"The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed."

"The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with countenance it can understand. Indolence and cowardice do the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence."

"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face."

"Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing."

"A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad."

"That was unthinkable, he said; all men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt it, his life would lose all meaning."

"Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions."

"Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles."

"And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart."

"The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression."

"Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny."

"Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question."

"So we are steaming along without any landmark, we can't gauge our speed. We are making progress and yet nothing is changing. It's not navigation but dreaming."

"As he himself said, "I will prove it to you, gentlemen, and i will prove it in two ways. First in the blinding clarity of the facts, and second, in the dim light cast by the mind of his criminal soul."

"You must realize that men make war as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all their soul."

"Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are."

"In medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions."

"Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road."

"Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light."

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

"Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears."

"Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without asking a clear question."

"Peace is the only battle worth waging."

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience."

"Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people."

"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

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

"As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means."

"There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four."

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

"One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it."

"The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth."

"I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist."

"Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are myrevolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity ofconsciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitationto death-and I refuse suicide."