I know positively… that 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 breathe in somebody’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. The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention. And it needs tremendous will power, a never ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses. Yes… it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it. That’s why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of our systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free, except death. . Albert Camus
Some Similar Quotes
  1. If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him... - Paulo Coelho
  2. What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  3. The whole image is that eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God's infinite love. That's the message we're brought up with, isn't it? Believe or die! Thank you, forgiving Lord, for all those options. - Bill Hicks
  4. Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can. - Dodie Smith
  5. It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love. - Sigmund Freud
More Quotes By Albert Camus
  1. And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one's work, and of...
  2. Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.
  3. Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
  4. What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.
  5. Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
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