Albert Camus Quotes
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Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.
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Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? ... Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.
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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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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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Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
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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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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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If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
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I rebel - therefore we exist.
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I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.
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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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When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
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What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
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The day of my arrest I was first put in a room where there were already several other prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked what I was in for. I said I'd killed an Arab and they were all silent.
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We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.
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To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
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One must place one's principles in big things. For the small, graciousness will suffice.
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Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
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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 guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
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Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
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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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It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.'
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What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.