Albert Camus Quotes
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... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.
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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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'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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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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To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate.
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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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... 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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Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.
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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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I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
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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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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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All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.
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Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.
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Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
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I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.
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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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It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
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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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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 main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand.
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I was absent at the moment I took up the most space.
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At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.
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You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.