Quotes by Algerian Authors - Page 3

After awhile you could get used to anything.
Albert Camus
You have truly gained the mastery of the very stronghold of philosophy, Mother. For without doubt only for lack of words you did not elaborate on this subject as did Tullius [Cicero], whose words will follow. For in the Hortensius, the book he wrote on the praise and defense of philosophy, he said: ‘But see, surely not the philosophers but all given to argument say that those who live just as they wish are happy.’ This is definitely false; for to want what is not appropriate is the worst of all miseries. It is not so miserable not to get what you want as to want to get what you ought not. Wickedness of will brings to everyone greater evil than good fortune brings good.
Augustine of Hippo
For in our hope we are saved.
Augustine of Hippo
He who falls, falls by his own will; and he who stands, stands by God's will.
Augustine of Hippo
Your respect for people does not mean you need themThis is your morality, even if they do not deserve it.
Waciny Laredj
We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.
Albert Camus
In medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions
Albert Camus
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
Albert Camus
If you haven’t lost your mind yet, that’s because you haven’t seen very much.
Yasmina Khadra
Maybe someone who dies at the age of a hundred doesn't feel anything more than the fear that grips us when we're six and it's nighttime and our mother comes in to turn out the light.
Kamel Daoud
For out of the perverse will came lust, and the service of lust ended in habit, and habit, not resisted, became necessity.
Augustine of Hippo
This disease of curiosity.
Augustine of Hippo
Stupidity has a knack for getting its way.
Albert Camus
There is only one class of men, the privileged class
Albert Camus
Oh, God, to know you is life. To serve You is freedom. To praise you is the soul's joy and delight. Guard me with the power of Your grace here and in all places. Now and at all times, forever. Amen.
Augustine of Hippo
O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us!" A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our word for it? It would have to be fulfilled. Brr...! the water is so cold! But let's reassure ourselves. It's too late now, it will always be too late. Fortunately!
Albert Camus
When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.
Albert Camus
When I look at my life and at the secret color which it has, I feel as if tears were trembling in my heart. I am just as much the lips that I have kissed as the nights spent in the 'House before the World,' just as much the child brought up in poverty as this frenzied ambition and thirst for life which sometimes carry me away.
Albert Camus
...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.
Albert Camus
As I usually do when I want to get rid of someone whose conversation bores me, I pretended to agree.
Albert Camus
One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it
Albert Camus
It is better to burn than to disappear.
Albert Camus
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
Albert Camus
I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
Albert Camus
And yet we were very much alike; we’d lost our souls, and we were ready to destroy others.
Yasmina Khadra
Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence
Albert Camus
On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice.
Albert Camus
This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
Albert Camus
On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus
In the age of ideologies, we must make up our minds about murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves have significance. If it has no such foundations, then we are plunged into madness there is no way out except to find some significance or to desist.
Albert Camus
Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in an action, can avoid committing murder.
Albert Camus
But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
Albert Camus
So it came to this, that— against the grain, no doubt—the condemned man had to hope the apparatus was in good working order! This, I thought, was a flaw in the system; and, on the face of it, my view was sound enough. On the other hand, I had to admit it proved the efficiency of the system. It came to this; the man under sentence was obliged to collaborate mentally, it was in his interest that all should go off without a hitch.
Albert Camus
Mother, death, love -- everyone shares, unequally, those three poles of fascination.
Kamel Daoud
February 13, 1936I ask of people more than they can give me. It is useless to maintain the contrary. But what a mistake and what despair. And myself perhaps...Seek contacts. All contacts. If I want to write about men, should I stop talking about the countryside? If the sky or light attract me, shall I forget the eyes or voices of those I love? Each time I am given the elements of a friendship, the fragments of an emotion, never the emotion or the friendship itself.
Albert Camus
Humans without humanity, A world of dread and fear for eternity.
Mouloud Benzadi
Ah, this dear old planet! All is clear now. We know ourselves; we now know of what we are capable.
Albert Camus
Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'.
Albert Camus
if we are wayfarers who want to return home, then we must see the world as a means of transportation (terestibus vel marinis vehiculis) and always remember to distinguish the means and ends.
Augustine of Hippo
Every good man resists others in those points in which he resists himself.
Augustine of Hippo
If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong t
Albert Camus
There is no longer a single idea explaining everything, but an infinite number of essences giving a meaning to an infinite number of objects. The world comes to a stop, but also lights up.
Albert Camus
Let's not worry. It's too late now. It will always be too late, fortunately!
Albert Camus
The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
Albert Camus
Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?
Augustine of Hippo
His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses: present, past, and future. God's knowledge has no change or variation.
Augustine of Hippo
... the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord.
Augustine of Hippo
You are not blamed for your unwilling ignorance, but because you fail to ask about what you do not know.... For no one is prevented from leaving behind the disadvantage of ignorance and seeking the advantage of knowledge.
Augustine of Hippo
That vague and wandering opinion of Deity is declared by an apostle to be ignorance of God:
Augustine of Hippo
Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that Thou mayest enter in. It is ruinous; repair Thou it. It has that within which must offend Thine eyes; I confess and know it. But who shall cleanse it? or to whom should I cry, save Thee? Lord, cleanse me from my secret faults, and spare Thy servant from the power of the enemy. I believe, and therefore do I speak.
Augustine of Hippo
Taking the continent as a whole, this religious tension may be responsible for the revival of the commonest racial feeling. Africa is divided into Black and White, and the names that are substituted- Africa south of the Sahara, Africa north of the Sahara- do not manage to hide this latent racism. Here, it is affirmed that White Africa has a thousand-year-old tradition of culture; that she is Mediterranean, that she is a continuation of Europe and that she shares in Graeco-Latin civilization. Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilized - in a word, savage.
Frantz Fanon
At first glance it seems strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: “When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you.” And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and my soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.
Frantz Fanon
As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find value for what is bad--since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the colour of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal. When the Negro dives--in other words, goes under--something remarkable occurs.
Frantz Fanon
Behold, now, how foolish it is, in so great an abundance of the truest opinions which can be extracted from these words, rashly to affirm which of them Moses particularly meant; and with pernicious contentions to offend charity itself, on account of which he hath spoken all the things whose words we endeavour to explain!
Augustine of Hippo
Actual freedom has not increased in proportion to man's awareness of it.
Albert Camus
Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
Albert Camus
Amin, you’re not making sense to me. Things have always been this way, since the beginning of time. Some die so others can be saved. You don’t believe in the salvation of others?
Yasmina Khadra
Why sacrifice some for the benefit of others? It’s generally the best and the bravest who choose to lay down their lives for the sake of those who hide in their holes. So why favor the sacrifice of the righteous in order to permit the less righteous to survive them? Don’t you think that’s a way of weakening the human species? What’s going to be left of it in a few generations if it’s always the best who are called upon to exit the scene so that the cowards, the counterfeits, the charlatans, and the pricks can continue to proliferate like rats?
Yasmina Khadra
You know you truly love somebody...When they hurt youAnd you still forgive themAnd they let you down But you don't leave themAnd they leave you But you can't help thinking about them
Mouloud Benzadi
... We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.
Albert Camus