[Love] is the type of disease that spares neither the intelligent nor the idiotic.

In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.

We all have a weakness for beauty.

I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

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.