Albert Camus Quotes
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Un homme se définit aussi bien par ses comédies que par ses élans sincères.1
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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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Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.
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I rebel - therefore we exist.
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To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate.
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But it's not easy. I've been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn't need words to make ourselves understood. But people don't love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn't.
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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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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's better to bet on this life than on the next.
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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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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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An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
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I have not stopped loving that which is sacred in this world.
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It is immoral not to tell.
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But - I cannot make a choice. I have my own sorrow, but I suffer with him, too; I share his pain. I understand all - that is my trouble.
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Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate.
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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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But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
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Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.
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Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
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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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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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There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
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This is the century of fear.