Albert Camus Quotes
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'The real saint', Baudelaire pretends to think, 'is he who flogs and kills people for their own good.' His argument will be heard. A race of real saints is beginning to spread over the earth for the purposes of confirming these curious conclusions about rebellion.
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The greatest saving one can make in the order of thought is to accept the unintelligibility of the world - and to pay attention to man.
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In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly.
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Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
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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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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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Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.
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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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The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He must dominate in his turn.
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But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The seas, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death--these are things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. Striving towards realism is therefore legitimate, for it is basically related to the artistic adventure.
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Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.
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When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
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If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.
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The artist reconstructs the world to his plan.
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There is no mystery in humans creation. Will performs this miracle. But at least there is no true creation without a secret.
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It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
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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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After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
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The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.
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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.
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A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
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Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting.
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After another moment's silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.
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Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.