"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!"
— Rudyard Kipling (If: A Father's Advice to His Son)

"My heart is so tired"
— Rudyard Kipling

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
— Albert Camus

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."
— Albert Camus

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
— Albert Camus

"Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?"
— Albert Camus

"Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day."
— Albert Camus

"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."
— Albert Camus

"I would rather live my life as if there is a god and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is."
— Albert Camus

"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."
— Albert Camus

"When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune."
— Albert Camus

"Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one's work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart."
— Albert Camus

"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
— Albert Camus

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
— Albert Camus

"But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself."
— Albert Camus

"Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."
— Albert Camus

"She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth."
— Albert Camus

"If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it."
— Albert Camus

"We are all special cases."
— Albert Camus

"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."
— Albert Camus

"La vérité c'est comme la lumière, aveugle. Le mensonge, au contraire, est un beau crépuscule qui met chaque objet en valeur."
— Albert Camus

"اندیشیدن، سرآغاز تحلیل رفتن است"
— Albert Camus

"An intellectual is someone whose mind is free time."
— Albert Camus

"Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends!"
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

"...the habit of despair is worse than despair itself."
— Albert Camus

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
French existentialist author & philosopher (1913 - 1960) "
— Albert Camus

"People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves."
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

"There is no frontier between being and appearing."
— Albert Camus

"I had been right I was still right I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well lived it another. I had done this and I hadn t done that. I hadn t done this thing and I had done another. And so? "
— Albert Camus (The Stranger)

"Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves."
— Albert Camus

"Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replace normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions."
— Albert Camus

"Dans notre société tout homme qui ne pleure pas à l’enterrement de sa mère risque d’être condamné à mort."
— Albert Camus

"After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason
"
— Albert Camus

"I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart."
— Albert Camus

"Nu există decît o problemă filosofică cu adevărat impor­tantă : sinuciderea. A hotărî dacă viaţa merită sau nu să fie trăită înseamnă a răspunde la problema fundamentală a filosofiei. Restul, dacă lumea are trei dimensiuni, dacă spiritul are nouă sau douăsprezece categorii, vine după aceea. Aces­tea sînt doar jocuri; dar mai întîi trebuie să răspunzi. Şi dacă e adevărat, după cum susţine Nietzsche, că un filosof, pentru a fi vrednic de stimă, trebuie să dea primul exemplul, înţele­gem cît de important este răspunsul, de vreme ce el va pre­cede gestul definitiv. Iată nişte evidenţe sensibile inimii, dar pe care trebuie să le adîncim pentru câ mintea noastră să le vadă limpede."
— Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)

"The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits."
— Albert Camus (The Plague)

"A partir do momento em que é reconhecido, o absurdo é uma paixão, a mais dilacerante de todas."
— Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)

"What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly."
— Albert Camus

"... au milieu des fléaux, qu'il y a dans les hommes plus de choses à admirer que de choses à mépriser."
— Albert Camus

"The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness."
— Albert Camus (L'etranger)

"Los que escriben con claridad tienen lectores, los que escriben oscuramente tienen comentaristas"
— Albert Camus

"...we rarely confide in those who are better than we. Rather, we are more inclined to flee their society. Most often, on the other hand, we confess to those who are like us and who share our weaknesses. Hence we don't want to improve ourselves and be bettered, for we should first have to be judged in default. We merely wish to be pitied and encouraged in the course we have chosen. In short, we should like, at the same time, to cease being guilty and yet not to make the effort of cleansing ourselves."
— Albert Camus

"Je suis pour la justice, mais je choisirais ma mère avant la justice."
— Albert Camus

"Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism."
— Albert Camus (The Fall)

"Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été."
— Albert Camus

"Astazi a murit mama. Sau poate ieri, nu stiu. Am primit o telegrama de la azil: "Mama decedata. Înmormîntarea mîine.
Sincere condoleanþe." Asta nu înseamna nimic. Poate ca a fost ieri."
— Albert Camus (The Stranger)

"Moreover, in this extremity of solitude none could count on any help from his neighbor; each had to bear the load of his troubles alone. If, by some chance, one of us tried to unburden himself or to say something about his feelings, the reply he got, whatever it might be, usually wounded him. And then it dawned on him that he and the man with him weren't talking about the same thing. For while he himself spoke from the depths of long days of brooding upon his personal distress, and the image he had tried to impart had been slowly shaped and proved in the fires of passion and regret, this meant nothing to the man to whom he was speaking, who pictured a conventional emotion, a grief that is traded on the market-place, mass-produced. Whether friendly or hostile, the reply always missed fire, and the attempt to communicate had to be given up. This was true of those at least for whom silence was unbearable, and since the others could not find the truly expressive word, they resigned themselves to using the current coin of language, the commonplaces of plain narrative, of anecdote, and of their daily paper. So in these cases, too, even the sincerest grief had to make do with the set phrases of ordinary conversation. Only on these terms could the prisoners of the plague ensure the sympathy of their concierge and the interest of their hearers."
— Albert Camus (The Plague)

"آیا زندگی مفهومی برای زیستن دارد؟...برای خوب زیستن همان بهتر که زندگی مفهومی نداشته باشد."
— Albert Camus (افسانه‌ی سیزیف)

"عصیان، حضور مداوم خویشتن خویش انسان است"
— Albert Camus (افسانه‌ی سیزیف)

"'Because,' Cormery went on, 'when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone ... you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.'"
— Albert Camus (The First Man: Le Premier Homme)