Albert Camus Quotes
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The Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom charitable souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
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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 loveless world is a dead world.
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A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.
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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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History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
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But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.
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The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.
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A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
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Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
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What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?
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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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To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.
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What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear... in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man.
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Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.
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The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.
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If Christianity is pessimistic as to man, it is optimistic as to human destiny. Well, I can say that, pessimistic as to human destiny, I am optimistic as to man.
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The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.
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No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
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In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.
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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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Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
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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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All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.