Yes, he knows what he’s talking about,” Tarrou added. “He has an insight into the anomalies in the lives of the people here who, though they have an instinctive craving for human contacts, can’t bring themselves to yield to it, because of the mistrust that keeps them apart. For it’s common knowledge that you can’t trust your neighbor; he may pass the disease to you without your knowing it, and take advantage of a moment of inadvertence on your part to infect you.
For a man who is “nobly born,” happiness lies in taking on the fate of everyman; not through a desire for renunciation but a will to happiness. To be happy, you need time. Lots of time. Happiness too is a long patience. And it is the need for money that robs us of time. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be rich means having time to be happy when you are worthy of happiness.
Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living.
What mattered was to humble himself, to organize his heart to match the rhythm of the days instead of submitting their rhythm to the curve of human hopes.
It is good for a man to judge himself occasionally. He is alone in being able to do so.
But it is bad to stop, hard to be satisfied with a single way of seeing, to go without contradiction, perhaps the most subtle of all spiritual forces. The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.
A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him but you see his incomprehensible dumb-show and you wonder why he is alive.
To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it.
For nothing in the world is it worth turning one’s back on what one loves. Yet that is what I’m doing – though why I do not know.
To impoverish that reality whose inhumanity constitutes man’s majesty is tantamount to impoverishing him himself.
Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal.
While our townspeople were trying to come to terms with their sudden isolation, the plague was posting sentries at the gates and turning away ships bound for Oran.
The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.
To keep going to the end means not only resisting but also relaxing. I need to be aware of myself, in so far as this is also an awareness of something that goes beyond me as an individual. I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.
Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question: “What would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers, to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.” Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
In order to keep faith with ourselves, we are obliged to respect in you what you do not respect in others.
He would be expressing himself from the depths of long days of meditation and suffering, the image that he wanted to communicate having been long tempered in the fire of waiting and passion. The other person, meanwhile, imagined a conventional emotion, the suffering that is hawked around the marketplace, a mass-produced melancholy.
Evening was coming on, but the town, once so noisy at this hour, was strangely still.
Les doutes, c’est ce que nous avons de plus intime.