Albert Camus Quotes
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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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A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?
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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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A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
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A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.
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Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting.
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When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
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Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
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Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
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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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I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
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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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We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
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A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
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They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
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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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Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
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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.
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A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
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Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.
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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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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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To lose one's life is no great matter; when the time comes I'll have the courage to lose mine. But what's intolerable is to see one's life being drained of meaning, to be told there's no reason for existing. A man can't live without some reason for living.
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Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.