The Stranger (L'Étranger) Quotes

“Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know.”

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.”

“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”

“I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison.”

“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”

“Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die.”

“The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.”

“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.”

“Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.”

“Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom. To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other.”

“Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.”

“Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man.”

“A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.”

“The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.”

“A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.”

“Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.”

“In order to cease being a doubtful case, one has to cease being, that's all.”

“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?”

“We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her.”

“We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink.”

“One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.”

“There is not love of life without despair about life.”

“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.”

“Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower.”

“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.”

“It's better to bet on this life than on the next.”

“It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.”

“To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”