Quotes by Algerian Authors - Page 2

Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. This is why our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.
Albert Camus
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.
Albert Camus
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.
Albert Camus
There is something divine in mindless beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it.
Albert Camus
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
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
It is a matter of living in that state of the absurd I know on what it is founded, this mind and this world straining against each other without being able to embrace each other. I ask for the rule— of life of that state, and what I am offered neglects its basis,negates one of the terms of the painful opposition, demands of me a resignation. I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is mylight.
Albert Camus
There is no sin unless through a man's own will, and hence the reward when we do right things also of our own
Augustine of Hippo
You're not defeated when you lose a battle.You are defeated when you give up the struggle
Mouloud Benzadi
Be yourself, And take control of your own destiny. There is nothing more disgraceful in life, Than living someone else’s life.
Mouloud Benzadi
No one should be ashamed to admit that they do not know what they do not know, in case while feigning knowledge, they come to deserve to never know.
Augustine of Hippo
He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
Albert Camus
People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
Albert Camus
If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it.
Albert Camus
Let us seek the respite where it is—in the very thick of battle. For in my opinion, and this is where I shall close, it is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own suffering and joys, builds for all.
Albert Camus
Psychology is action not thinking about oneself.
Albert Camus
I know of only one duty, and that is to love.
Albert Camus
This, then, is true liberty: the joy that comes in doing what is right. At the same time, it is also devoted service in obedience to righteous precept.
Augustine of Hippo
For dismissed by You from Paradise, and having taken my journey into a far country, I cannot by myself return, unless Thou meetest the wanderer: for my return has throughout the whole tract of this world's time waited for Your mercy.
Augustine of Hippo
It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
Albert Camus
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads.
Albert Camus
If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.
Albert Camus
I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed.
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
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
Albert Camus
People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas,at the long course of the rivers,at the vast compass of the ocean,at the circular motion of the stars,and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.
Augustine of Hippo
A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
Albert Camus
I belong to a nation which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history…Your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?
Albert Camus
I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea streaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
Albert Camus
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
Albert Camus
I simply took refuge among women. As you know, they don't really condemn any weakness; they would be more inclined to try to humiliate or disarm our strength. This is why woman is the reward, not of the warrior, but of the criminal. She is his harbor, his haven; it is in a woman's bed that he is generally arrested. Is she not all that remains to us of earthly paradise?
Albert Camus
Trust is like a valuable antique, once gone, it can never be replaced.
Mouloud Benzadi
Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and boats. Others, fewer these, Tarrou may have been one of them, had desired reunion with something they couldn't have defined, but which seemed to them the only desirable thing on earth. For want of a better name, they sometimes called it peace.
Albert Camus
Today everyone on our side knows that criminality is not the result of the Algerian's congenital nature nor the configuration of his nervous system. The war in Algeria and wars of national liberation bring out the true protagonists. We have demonstrated that in the colonial situation the colonized are confronted with themselves. They tend to use each other as a screen. Each prevents his neighbor from seeing the national enemy. And when exhausted after a sixteen-hour day of hard work the colonized subject collapses on his mat and a child on the other side of the canvas partition cries and prevents him from sleeping, it just so happens it's a little Algerian. When he goes to beg for a little semolina or a little oil from the shopkeeper to whom he already owes several hundred francs and his request is turned down, he is overwhelmed by an intense hatred and desire to kill—and the shopkeeper happens to be an Algerian. When, after weeks of keeping a low profile, he finds himself cornered one day by the kaid demanding "his taxes," he is not even allowed the opportunity to direct his hatred against the European administrator; before him stands the kaid who excites his hatred—and he happens to be an Algerian.
Frantz Fanon
What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men's eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh, probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely body, at mastering and humiliating it.
Albert Camus
For it is one thing to see the Land of Peace from a wooded ridge, and yet another to walk the road that leads to it.
Augustine of Hippo
I grant we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But it is a fact one doesn't come across many of them, and anyhow it must be a hard vocation. That's why I decided to take, in every predicament, the victim's side, so as to reduce the damage done. Among them I can at least try to discover how on attains to the third category; in other words, to peace.
Albert Camus
I am no more than a child, but my Father lives for ever and I have a Protector great enough to save me.
Augustine of Hippo
It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above.
Frantz Fanon
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions
Frantz Fanon
I felt as though I was partly unlearning what i had never learned and yet knew so well: I mean, how to live.
Albert Camus
He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
Albert Camus
The world is a book, and those who don't travel only read one page.
Augustine of Hippo
This is why it is not true that culture can be, even temporarily, suspended in order to make way for a new culture. Man’s unbroken testimony as to his suffering and his nobility cannot be suspended; the act of breathing cannot be suspended. There is no culture without legacy, and we cannot and must not reject anything of ours, the legacy of the West. Whatever the works of the future may be, they will bear the same secret, made up of courage and freedom, nourished by the daring of thousands of artists of all times and all nations. Yes, when modern tyranny shows us that, even when confined to his calling, the artist is a public enemy, it is right. But in this way tyranny pays its respects, through the artist, to an image of man that nothing has ever been able to crush. My conclusion will be simple. It will consist of saying, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history: “Let us rejoice.
Albert Camus
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
Albert Camus
I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject.
Albert Camus
I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to 'LIllustration. Something desperate, you know."Zagreus smiled. "You're a poor man, Mersault. That explains half of your disgust. And the other half you owe to your own submission to poverty.
Albert Camus
They were silent, humiliated by this return of the defeated, furious at their own silence, but the more it was prolonged the less capable they were of breaking it.
Albert Camus
But she was so happy in her gilded cage, wasn’t she? She ate well, slept well, enjoyed herself She lacked nothing. And then, look, a bunch of mental cases turn her away from her happiness and send her to -- how did you put it? -- to ‘blow herself away’?. The good doctor lives next door to a war but he doesn’t want to hear a word about it. And he thinks his wife shouldn’t worry about it, either. … We’re at war. Some people take up arms; others twiddle their thumbs. And still others make a killing in the name of the Cause. That’s life. … Your wife chose her side. The happiness you offered her smelled of decay. It repulsed her, you get it? She didn’t want your happiness. She couldn’t work on her suntan while her people were bent under the Zionist yoke. Do I have to draw you a picture to make you understand, or do you refuse to look reality in the face?
Yasmina Khadra
But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.
Albert Camus
Just as there is a moment when the artist must stop, when the sculpture must be left as it is, the painting untouched—just as a determination not to know serves the maker more than all the resources of clairvoyance—so there must be a minimum of ignorance in order to perfect a life in happiness. Thosewho lack such a thing must set about acquiring it: unintelligence must be earned.
Albert Camus
Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été.
Albert Camus
It seems that the people of Oran are like that friend of Flaubert who, on the point of death, casting a last glance at the irreplaceable earth, exclaimed: "Close the window, it's too beautiful.
Albert Camus
My soul’s a burden to me, I’ve had enough of it. I’m eager to be in that country, where the sun kills every question. I don’t belong here.
Albert Camus
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
Albert Camus
You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.
Albert Camus
For you [God] are infinite and never change. In you 'today' never comes to an end: and yet our 'today' does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply 'today'...But you yourself are eternally the same. In your 'today' you will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in your 'today' you have made all that existed yesterday and for ever before.
Augustine of Hippo
We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.
Albert Camus
How did I picture the life after the grave?I Fairly bawled out at him: 'A life in which I can remember this life on earth. That's all I want of it.
Albert Camus
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.
Albert Camus