Albert Camus Quotes
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I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.
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I rebel - therefore we exist.
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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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You always get exaggerated notions of things you don't know anything about.
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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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In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.
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I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
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Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? ... Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.
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The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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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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We're going forward, but nothing changes.
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We are condemned to live together.
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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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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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Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
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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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We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.
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Let’s not beat around the bush; I love life - that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.
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But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
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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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It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.
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To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.
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In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.
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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.