Albert Camus Quotes
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Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
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When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.
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I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.
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There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.
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She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.
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Life is a sum of all your choices". So, what are you doing today?
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Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.
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Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
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No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
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It occurred to me that anyway one more Sunday was over that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed.
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Real fulfillment, for the man who allows absolutely free rein to his desires, and who much dominate everything, lies in hatred.
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Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
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It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
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Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness or generosity. A universe - in other words a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.
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The rebel can never find peace. He knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil. The value which supports him is never given to him once and for all - he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly.
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Avoir de l'argent c'est se libérer de l'argent.
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We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.
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In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
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To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
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But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.
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In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
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There lay certitude; there, in the daily round. All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn't waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.
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Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.
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The essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy.