Albert Camus Quotes
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I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that I finally obey.
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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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A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
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Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.
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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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All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
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Life is a sum of all your choices". So, what are you doing today?
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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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I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.
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Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.
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Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting.
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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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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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The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
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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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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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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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At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
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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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Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
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We're going forward, but nothing changes.
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Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
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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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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.