Albert Camus Quotes
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I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It’s not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity. Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy. The miracle of not having to talk about oneself.
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One must place one's principles in big things. For the small, graciousness will suffice.
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An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.
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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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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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Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
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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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A régime Nazism which invented a biological foreign policy was obviously acting against its own best interests. But at least it obeyed its own particular logic.
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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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It was in Spain that my generation learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.
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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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Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
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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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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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It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
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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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What gives value to travel is fear. It is a fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country, we are seized by a vague fear and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. I look upon it more as an occasion for testing.
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... unhappiness is like marriage. We believe we chose it, but then it is choosing us. That is how it is, we can do nothing about it.
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Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
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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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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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It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
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Ce que, finalement, je sais de plus sûr sur la morale et les obligations des hommes, c'est au football que je le dois.
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I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.