Quotes by Algerian Authors - Page 2

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence
Albert Camus
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
Albert Camus
If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God.
Augustine of Hippo
For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, 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.
Albert Camus
The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.
Augustine of Hippo
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
Albert Camus
A community is nothing else than a harmonious collection of individuals.
Augustine of Hippo
In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force
Frantz Fanon
This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity.
Albert Camus
There is no health in those who are displeased by an element in Your creation, just as there was none in me when I was displeased by many things You had made. Because my soul didn't dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to You whatever was displeasing.
Augustine of Hippo
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. ButSisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He tooconcludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neithersterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain,in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man'sheart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy
Albert Camus
Love the sinner and hate the sin.
Augustine of Hippo
When it happens that I am more moved by the song than the thing which is sung, I confess that I sin in a manner deserving punishment
Augustine of Hippo
We are not certain we are never certain.
Albert Camus
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.
Albert Camus
For in our hope we are saved.
Augustine of Hippo
...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...
Albert Camus
I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
Albert Camus
Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.
Albert Camus
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.
Albert Camus
At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
Albert Camus
In life, things can always go wrong, So always keep your heart strong, Carry on, and never give up hope.
Mouloud Benzadi
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
Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
Albert Camus
Pray as though everything depends on God. And work as if everything depends on you.
Augustine of Hippo
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
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
Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.
Albert Camus
Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.
Albert Camus
Of whom and of what can I say: "I know that"! 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. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance the gap will never be filled.
Albert Camus
Yet we must say something when those who say the most are saying nothing.
Augustine of Hippo
Often the contempt of vainglory becomes a source of even more vainglory, for it is not being scorned when the contempt is something one is proud of.
Augustine of Hippo
To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think.
Frantz Fanon
What we call fundamental truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others.
Albert Camus
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
Albert Camus
Living above the world, each discovering his own weight, seeing his face brighten and darken with the day, the night, each of the four inhabitants of the house was aware of a presence that was at once a judge and a justification among them. The world, here, became a personage, counted among those from whom advice is gladly taken, those in whom equilibrium has not killed love.
Albert Camus
It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
Albert Camus
the evil that is in this world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. 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;
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
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. 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;
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
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
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
People? They usually ask only stupid questions, forcing you to reply with equally stupid answers. For instance, they ask you what you do, not what you would have liked to do. They ask you what you own, not what you’ve lost. They ask about the woman you married, not about the one you love. About your name, but not if it suits you. They ask your age, but not how well you’ve lived those years. They ask about the city you live in, not about the city that lives in you. And they ask if you pray, not if you fear God.So I’ve gotten used to answering these questions with silence. You know, when we shut up, we force others to reconsider their mistakes.
Ahlam Mosteghanemi
But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.
Albert Camus
The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.
Albert Camus
Man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them.
Albert Camus
How do you want us to tune the lens and our eyes are filled with tears
Ahlam Mosteghanemi
The innocent is the person who explains nothing.
Albert Camus
Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory... Everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion - it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
Albert Camus
True happiness cannot not be achieved through wealth, fame or action, But through love, modesty and self satisfaction.
Mouloud Benzadi
But if you do not wish to die of thirst in the desert, drink charity. This is the fountain the Lord has willed to place here, lest we faint on the way, and we shall drink it more abundantly when we come to the Fatherland.
Augustine of Hippo
When spirits fall, their darkness is revealed, for they are stripped of the garment of your light. By the misery and restlessness which they then suffer you make clear to us how noble a being is your rational creation, for nothing less than yourself suffices to give it rest and happiness. This means that it cannot find them in itself. For you, O God, will shine on the darkness about us. From you proceeds our garment of light, and our dusk shall be noonday.
Augustine of Hippo
She was waiting, but she didn't know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.
Albert Camus
But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.
Albert Camus
Do you believe in God, doctor?"No - but what does that really mean? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I've long ceased finding that original.
Albert Camus
You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.
Augustine of Hippo
...a man is not in any difficulty in making a reply according to his faith ... to those who try to defame our Holy Scripture. ... when they produce from any of their books a theory contrary to Scripture ... either we shall have some ability to demonstrate that it is absolutely false, or at least we ourselves will hold it so without any shadow of a doubt. ...let us choose [the doctrine] which appears as certainly the meaning intended by the author. ... For it is one thing to fail to recognize the primary meaning of the writer, and another to depart from the norms of religious belief.
Augustine of Hippo
No matter how dark and hopeless a situation may seem, always hold on and never give up your dream.
Mouloud Benzadi
There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.
Albert Camus