Albert Camus Quotes
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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 may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.
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At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
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But the world itself has no reason, and I can say so, I who have experienced it all, from the creation to the destruction.
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I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.
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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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Life is a sum of all your choices". So, what are you doing today?
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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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Beware of those who say: "I know this too well to be able to express it." For if they cannot do so, this is because they don't know it or because out of laziness they stopped at the outer crust.
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For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.
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Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
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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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Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
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Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting.
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It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.
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Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.
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I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don't know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.
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It is natural to give a clear view of the world after accepting the idea that it must be clear.
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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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I rebel - therefore we exist.
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A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
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Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.
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And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
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Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.