Albert Camus Quotes
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In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.
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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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Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.
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Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not combine them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replace normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions.
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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 feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.
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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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I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
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Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.
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Thus, I always began by assuming the worst; my appeal was dismissed. That meant, of course, I was to die. Sooner than others, obviously. 'But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.' And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-- since, in either case, other men will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably.
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Still, obviously, one can't be sensible all the time.
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Without work all life goes rotten.
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In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul.
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Old women even forget how to love their sons. The heart gets worn out, Monsieur.
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Un homme se définit aussi bien par ses comédies que par ses élans sincères.1
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At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.
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If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
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A loveless world is a dead world.
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We are condemned to live together.
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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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This is the century of fear.
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We all have a weakness for beauty.
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You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us.
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I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.