Albert Camus Quotes
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If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
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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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Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
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Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture.
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Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.
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Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.
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Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.
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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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In normal times all of us know, whether consciously or not, that there is no love which can't be bettered; nevertheless, we reconcile ourselves more or less easily to the fact that ours has never risen above the average.
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'This is the truth,' we say. 'You can discuss it as much as you want; we aren't interested. But in a few years there'll be the police who will show you we are right.'
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Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.
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Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.
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I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.
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My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.
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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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No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.
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The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
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For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.
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Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
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Un homme se définit aussi bien par ses comédies que par ses élans sincères.1
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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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He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
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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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The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.