Quotes by Algerian Authors - Page 3

Purity both of the body and the soul rests on the steadfastness of the will strengthened by God's grace, and cannot be forcibly taken from an unwilling person.
Augustine of Hippo
In my deepest wound I saw your glory, and it dazzled me.
Augustine of Hippo
A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
This is pride when the soul abandons Him to Whom it ought to cleave as its end and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction.
Augustine of Hippo
it is a higher glory... to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war.
Augustine of Hippo
Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.
Albert Camus
Love and do what you like.
St. Augustine
Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
Albert Camus
I was still unteachable, being inflated with the novelty of heresy.
Augustine of Hippo
But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.
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
But memory is less disposed to compromise
Albert Camus
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
Albert Camus
At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all accept these things.
Albert Camus
From the olive-strewn forum, one could see the village down below. Not a sound came from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The sea also lay silent, as if breathless beneath the unending shower of cold, glittering light. From the Chenoua, a distant cock crow alone sang the fragile glory of the day. Across the ruins, as far as one could see, there were nothing but pitted stones and absinthe plants, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the crystal air. It was as if the morning stood still, as if the sun had stopped for an immeasurable moment. In this light and silence, years of night and fury melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself, as if my heart had long been stopped and was now gently beginning to beat again.
Albert Camus
Humans without humanity, A world of dread and fear for eternity.
Mouloud Benzadi
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
It is better to burn than to disappear.
Albert Camus
It is indeed a song of steps. And as I have often said to you, these steps are not made to descend but to ascend. The questioner wishes then to ascend; and where does he wish to ascend if not to heaven? What does this mean—to ascend to heaven? Does he wish to ascend so as to be in the heavens with the sun, the moon, and the stars? Far from that! But there is in heaven an eternal Jerusalem where the angels, our co-citizens, are. From these co-citizens we on earth are estranged. In this exile we sigh; in the city we shall have joy.
Augustine of Hippo
Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.
Augustine of Hippo
Having money is a way of being free of money
Albert Camus
Either it falls on your head like a roof tile or it attaches itself to your insides like a tapeworm. Afterward, you no longer see the world in the same way. You’ve got only one thing on your mind: the thing that has taken you over, body and soul. You want to lift it so you can see what’s under it. And from that point on, you can never turn back. Besides, you’re no longer giving the orders. You think you’re in control, doing what you want to do, but it’s not true. You’re nothing but the instrument of your own frustrations. For you, life and death come down to the same thing, Somewhere, you must have renounced everything that could have given you a chance of returning to earth, to the real world. You’re an extraterrestrial. You live in a kind of limbo, stalking houris and unicorns. As for this world, you don’t even want to hear about it anymore. You’re just waiting for the right moment to cross the threshold. The only way to get back what you’ve lost or to fix what you’ve screwed up -- in other words, the only way to make something of your life -- is to end it with a flourish. … The way you see it, the day of your funeral procession will be the day when you’re exalted in other people’s eyes.
Yasmina Khadra
I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter.
Augustine of Hippo
… I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.
Albert Camus
Humans without humanity, trouble in the World for eternity.
Mouloud Benzadi
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.
Augustine of Hippo
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
In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
A sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart. Nay, even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact.
Augustine of Hippo
How many crimes have been committed for no other reason than that the perpetrator could not bear being in the wrong!
Albert Camus
Get a grip on yourself. there's only one god here on earth, and that's you. If you don't like the world, make one you like better.
Yasmina Khadra
Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
Albert Camus
It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
Albert Camus
Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.
Augustine of Hippo
The evil that is in the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. One 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 that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.
Albert Camus
... The dominion of good men is profitable, not so much for themselves as for human affairs. But the dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater licence in wickedness;
Augustine of Hippo
Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
Albert Camus
Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true, and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels.
Albert Camus
Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
Albert Camus
An intense feeling carries with it its own universe magnificent or wretched as the case may be.
Albert Camus
Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value and its face of eter1nal youth.
Albert Camus
What should you, O man, do, you who seek your own glory whenever you do anything good, while when you do something bad, you figure out ways to blame God.
Augustine of Hippo
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
Albert Camus
Life is the sum of all your choices.
Albert Camus
It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while still preferring happiness, to face destruction while cherishing the idea of a higher civilization.
Albert Camus
Life is a misery, death an uncertainty. Suppose it steals suddenly upon me, in what state shall I leave this world? When can I learn what I have here neglected to learn? Or is it true that death will cut off and put an end to all care and all feeling? This is something to be inquired into.But no, this cannot be true. It is not for nothing, it is not meaningless that all over the world is displayed the high and towering authority of the Christian faith. Such great and wonderful things would never have been done for us by God, if the life of the soul were to end with the death of the body. Why then do I delay? Why do I not abandon my hopes of this world and devote myself entirely to the search for God and for the happy life?
Augustine of Hippo
Lord who art always the same give that I know myself give that I know Thee.
St. Augustine
You must realize that men make war as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all their soul.
Albert Camus
The man who let the love of his life pass him by will end up alone with his regrets and all the sighs in the world won't soothe his soul.
Yasmina Khadra
Every good man resists others in those points in which he resists himself.
Augustine of Hippo
You can know all there is to know about life and mankind, but what do you really know about yourself?
Yasmina Khadra
Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom.
Albert Camus
Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. If they are happy by surprise, they find themselves disabled, unhappy to be deprived of their unhappiness.
Albert Camus
He cannot have God for his Father who will not have the Church for his mother.
Augustine of Hippo
Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.
Frantz Fanon
For every man, however laudably he lives, yet yields in some points to the lust of the flesh.
Augustine of Hippo
If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.
Augustine of Hippo
The end of life puts the longest life on a par with the shortest.
Augustine of Hippo
For I am aware what ability is requisite to persuade the proud how great is the virtue of humility, which raises us, not by a quite human arrogance, but by a divine grace, above all earthly dignities that totter on this shifting scene.
Augustine of Hippo
Christ is not valued at all, unless he is valued above all.
Augustine of Hippo