Albert Camus Quotes
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Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
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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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If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
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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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The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
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I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.
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Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.
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The main thing is that everything become simple, easy enough for a child to understand.
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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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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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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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Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.
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They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
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You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.
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There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
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Every minute of life carries with it its miraculous value, and its face of eternal youth.
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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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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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... man has an idea of a better world than this. But better does not mean different, it means unified... Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonabledesire and claims to give life a form it does not have.
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I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
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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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If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
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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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Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.