The Plague Quotes

“On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“من بیشتر با شکست یافتگان احساس همدردی می‌کنم تا با مقدسین. گمان می‌کنم که من قهرمانی و تقدس را زیاد نمی‌پسندم. آنچه برایم جالب است انسان بودن است.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“I've been thinking it over for years. While we
loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't
love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only
I couldn't." - Grant”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she--or he--would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“A loveless world is a dead world.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“he's incapable of suffering for a long time, or being happy for a long time. Which means that he's incapable of anything really worth while.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“After a short silence the doctor raised himself a little in his chair and asked if Tarrou had an idea of the path to follow for attaining peace.

"Yes, he replied. "The path of sympathy.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“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.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“le mal qui est dans le monde vient presque toujours de l'ignorance”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist's waiting room on an uncomfortable chair; live on one's balcony on a Sunday afternoon; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, choose the most roundabout and least convenient routes on the railway (and, naturally, travel standing up); queue at the box-office for theatres and so on and not take one's seat; etc.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“There have been many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. [...] When a war breaks out people say: 'It won't last, it's too stupid.' And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn't prevent it from lasting. Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people wold notice if they were not always thinking about themselves. In this respect, the citizens of Oran were like the rest of the world, they thought about themselves, in other words, they were humanists: they did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end and, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end, humanists first of all because they have not prepared themselves.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. And i know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breath in someone's face and fasten the infection on him. What's natural is the microbe. All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world. ”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Personne n'est capable réellement de penser à personne, fût-ce dans le pire des malheurs. Car penser réellement à quelqu'un, c'est y penser minute après minute, sans être distrait par rien, ni les soins du ménage, ni la mouche qui vole, ni les repas, ni une démangeaison. Mais il y a toujours des mouches et des démangeaisons. C'est pourquoi la vie est difficile à vivre.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Sometimes at midnight, in the great silence of the sleep-bound town, the doctor turned on his radio before going to bed for the few hours’ sleep he allowed himself. And from the ends of the earth, across the thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering that he cannot see.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“The great longing of an unquiet heart is to possess constantly and consciously the loved one, or, failing that, to be able to plunge the loved one, when a time of absence intervenes, into a dreamless sleep timed to last unbroken until the day they meet again.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“It is forbidden to spit on cats in plague-time.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Perhaps the easiest way of making a town's acquaintance is to ascertain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth - in other words, to silence.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“For many years I've been ashamed, mortally ashamed, of having been, even with the best intentions, even at many removes, a murderer in my turn. As time went on I merely learned that even those who were better than the rest could not keep themselves nowadays from killing or letting others kill, because such is the logic by which they live; and that we can't stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“By giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“In short, from then on, we accepted our status as prisoners; we were reduced to our past alone and even if a few people were tempted to live in the future, they quickly gave it up, as far as possible, suffering the wounds that the imagination eventually inflicts on those who trust in it.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“Sometimes at midnight, in the great silence of the sleep bound town, the doctor turned on his radio before going to bed for the few hours' sleep he allowed himself. And from the ends of the earth, across thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in the suffering that he cannot see. "Oran! Oran!" In vain the call rang over oceans, in vain Rieux listened hopefully; always the tide of eloquence began to flow, bringing home still more the unbridgeable gulf that lay between Grand and the speaker. "Oran, we're with you!" they called emotionally. But not, the doctor told himself, to love or to die together-- and that's the only way...”
― Albert Camus, The Plague