I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight.. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.

In our society, any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.

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.

In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly.