A Quote by Albert Camus
We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.
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Things and persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds. How unconsciously we judge others by the light that is within ourselves, condemning or approving them by our own conception of right and wrong, honor and dishonor! We show by our judgment just what the light within us is.
Before making peace, war is necessary, and that war must be made with our self. Our worst enemy is our self: our faults, our weaknesses, our limitations. And our mind is such a traitor! What does it? It covers our faults even from our own eyes, and points out to us the reason for all our difficulties: others! So it constantly deludes us, keeping us unaware of the real enemy, and pushes us towards those others to fight them, showing them to us as our enemies.
All of us , I believe , carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there :places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem'We are seven' ,our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened.By way of returning the compliment , we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far from them.
We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us. Even after we outgrow some of these others—our parents, for instance—and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live.
Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.
Our weaknesses are always evident, both to ourselves and others. But our strengths are hidden until we choose to reveal them--and that is when we are truly tested. When all that we have within is exposed, and we may no longer blame our inadequacies for our failure, but must instead depend upon our strengths to succeed ... that is when the measure of a man is taken, my boy.
We have all of us free access to all that is great, and good, and happy, and carry within ourselves a key to all the treasures that heaven has to bestow upon us. We starve in the midst of plenty, groan under infirmities, with the remedy in our own hand; live and die without knowing and feeling anything of the One only God, whilst we have it in our power to know and enjoy it in as great a reality as we know and feel the power of this world over us; for Heaven is as near to our souls as this world is to our bodies; and we are created, we are redeemed, to have our conversation in it.
Let us also love our neighbors as ourselves. Let us have charity and humility. Let us give alms because these cleanse our souls from the stains of sin. Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give. For these they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve.
Our job is not to amuse our readers. Our mission is to stir them, inform and inflame them. Our task is to continually hold up our government and our leaders to clear-eyed analysis, unaffected by professional spinmeisters and agenda-pushers.
No one wishes for crisis, but when crises come, they can call forth our best impulses, those of compassion, courage, creativity, and community. And if there are crimes and evils hidden in the dark places of our society and the darker places of our consciousnesses, all the better they come to the surface to be seen, understood, confronted, and healed. If our generation is called to bear a burden of that healing, it is a powerful calling and honor and one within our capability.
Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.
Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we form any conception of what are his sensations...His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have this adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.
It is our task-our essential, central, crucial task-to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures.
By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives.
The Islamic State does not want us to open our doors to their refugees. It wants them to be hopeless and desperate. It does not want us to enjoy ourselves with our families and friends in bars and concert halls, stadiums and restaurants. It wants us to huddle in our houses, within our own social groups, and close our doors in fear.
The selfless love that we give to others, to the point of being willing to sacrifice our lives for them, is all the proof I need that human beings are not mere animals of self-interest. We carry within us a divine spark, and if we chose to recognize it, our lives have dignity, meaning, hope.
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