To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

I want to know if I can live with what I know, and only than.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject.

I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It’s not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity. Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy. The miracle of not having to talk about oneself.

But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.

Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down... There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.