From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes ‘responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.’ It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, ’the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?
All who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.
I noticed that he laid stress on my “intelligence.” It puzzled me rather why what would count as a good point in an ordinary person should be used against an accused man as an overwhelming proof of his guilt.
Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day. There are always reasons for murdering a man. On the contrary, it is impossible to justify his living. That’s why crime always finds lawyers, and innocence only rarely.
Fast asleep, and finished with the world. No more worries. He’ll slip without knowing from a sleep filled with shadows to a sleep free from dreams. No struggle for him. Not like the rest of us. He’s spared that torment. He’ll just sleep on, with no interruption. Sleep and death. He won’t know the difference.
Tarrou had “lost the match,” as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing affection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.
In the early days, when they thought this epidemic was much like other epidemics, religion held its ground. But once these people realized their instant peril, they gave their thoughts to pleasure. And all the hideous fears that stamp their faces in the daytime are transformed in the fiery, dusty nightfall into a sort of hectic exaltation, an unkempt freedom fevering in their blood.
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible. As for the possible, men suffice.
She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
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.
To state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.
In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist.
They deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them.
Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought which transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, linked with an irresistible charm.
Vivre, c’est faire vivre l’absurde.
Every individual collaborates with the entire cosmos, whether we know it or not, whether we want it or not.” The individual is lost in the destiny of the species and the eternal movement of the spheres. “Everything that has existed is eternal, the sea throws it back on the shore.
I just wanted to tell you that with all your faults I love you. I love or revere very few people. As for the rest, I’m ashamed of my indifference to them. But for those I love, nothing and no one, neither I nor certainly they themselves, can ever make me stop loving them. It took me a long time to learn that; now I know it.
I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense.
Let’s not worry. It’s too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!