All normal people -I added as on afterthought- had more or less desired the death of those they loved, at some time or another.
Kadang dibutuhkan lebih banyak keberanian untuk hidup daripada untuk mengakhiri hidup.
Smiling despair. No solution, but constantly exercising an authority over myself that I know is useless. The essential thing is not to lose oneself, and not to lose that part of oneself that lies sleeping in the world.
He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little.
So I learned that even after a single day’s experience of the outside world a man could easily live a hundred years in prison. He’d have laid up enough memories never to be bored.
But it is obvious that absurdism hereby admits that human life is the only necessary good since it is precisely life that makes this encounter possible and since, without life, the absurdist wager would have no basis. To say that life is absurd, the conscience must be alive.
She had put on a white linen dress and let her hair down. I told her she was beautiful and she laughed with delight.
One realizes that he is born of this country where everything is given to be taken away.
He wasn’t even sure he was alive because he was living like a dead man.
But, after all, I was on the right side; that was enough to satisfy my conscience. The feeling of the law, the satisfaction of being right, the joy of self-esteem, cher monsieur, are powerful incentives for keeping us upright or keeping us moving forward. On the other hand, if you deprive men of them, you transform them into dogs frothing with rage.
We see that affirmation implicit in every act of rebellion is extended to something that transcends the individual in so far as it withdraws him from his supposed solitude and provides him with a reason to act... Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does no belong to him alone.
A man’s rule of conduct and his scale of values have no meaning except through the quantity and variety of experiences he has been in a position to accumulate.
Living this way, in his own presence, time took on its most extreme dimensions, and each hour seemed to contain a world.
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.
Words always take on the color of the deeds or sacrifices they evoke.
At this hour of night, his life seemed so remote to him, he was so solitary and indifferent to everything and to himself as well, that Mersault felt he had at last attained what he was seeking, that the peace which filled him now was born of that patient self-abandonment he had pursued and achieved with the help of this warm world so willing to deny him without anger.
What am I doing here, what is the point of these smiles and gestures? My home is neither here nor elsewhere. And the world has become merely unknown landscape where my heart can lean on nothing. Foreign – who can know what this word means?
How many crimes have been committed for no other reason than that the perpetrator could not bear being in the wrong!
The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then dictate his conduct.
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.