Albert Camus Quotes
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Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
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We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.
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Have you noticed that only death arouses our emotions? How we love thee friends who have just passed away, right? How we admire those master who no longer speak, their mouths full of dirt. We them we are not obligated.
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It is better to burn than to disappear.
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There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
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This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.
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It's better to bet on this life than on the next.
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To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate.
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But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
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To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
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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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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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It is immoral not to tell.
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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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The preceding merely defines a way of thinking. But the point is to live.
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We're going forward, but nothing changes.
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Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.
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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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Un homme se définit aussi bien par ses comédies que par ses élans sincères.1
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I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.
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I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.
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The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression.
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Something must happen; that is the reason for most human relationships. Something must happen; even servitude in love, in war, ordeath.
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The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand.