"My dear,In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love.In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile.In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.I realized, through it all, that. In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger " something better, pushing right back.Truly yours, Albert CamusI like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry."

"You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world-in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests."

"In a certain sense it might well be said that his was an exemplary life. He was one of those rare people, rare in our town as elsewhere, who have the courage of their good feelings. What little he told of his personal life vouched for acts of kindness and a capacity for affection that no one in our times dares own to. Without a blush he confessed to dearly loving his nephews and sister, his only surviving near relation, whom he went to France to visit every other year. He admitted that the thought of his parents, whom he lost when he was very young, often gave him a pang. He did not conceal the fact that he had a special affection for a church bell in his part of the town which started pealing very melodiously at about five every afternoon."

"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."

"I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless."

"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."

"We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible."

"Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness."

"Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion."

"One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day."

"There is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."

"I never truly believed that human business was some serious thing."

"You are forgiven for your happiness and your successes only if you generously consent to share them."

"You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth. It was enough for you to serve the politics of reality whereas, in our wildest aberrations, we still had a vague conception of the politics of honor."

"Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness."

"In short, whoever does violence to truth or its expression eventually mutilates justice, even though he thinks he is serving it. From this point of view, we shall deny to the very end that a press is true because it is revolutionary; it will be revolutionary only if it is true, and never otherwise."

"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is."

"Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable."

"What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men's eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh, probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely body, at mastering and humiliating it."

"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."

"To know oneself one should assert oneself."

"I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger."

"But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."

"A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?"

"There is scarcely any passion without struggle."

"He who despairs of the human condition is a coward but he who has hope for it is a fool."

"In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

"In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon."

"Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it."

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

"Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves."

"But this time is ours, and we cannot live hating ourselves."

"Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death."

"If Aliosha had come to the conclusion that neither God nor immortality existed, he would immediately have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not only a question of the working classes; it is above all, in its contemporary incarnation, a question of atheism, a question of the tower of Babel, which is constructed without God's help, not to reach to the heavens, but to bring the heavens down to earth."

"I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know."

"...since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes towards the heaven where He sits in silence?"

"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."

"How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it."

"Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies."

"It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end."

"An intense feeling carries with it its own universe magnificent or wretched as the case may be."

"The hopeless hope is what sustains us in difficult moments, our comrades will be more patient than the executioners and more numerous than the bullets."

"A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession."

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."

"I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace. And today I am still trying to find it; still trying to understand all those others and not to be the enemy of anyone. I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, and that's the only way in which we can hope for some peace or, failing that, a decent death. This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good."

"Real nobility is based on scorn, courage, and profound indifference."

"The only deep emotion I occasionally felt in these affairs was gratitude, when all was going well and I was left, not only peace, but freedom to come and go--never kinder and gayer with one woman than when I had just left another's bed, as if I extended to all others the debt I had just contracted toward one of them."

"All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State."

"Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep."