Albert Camus Quotes
-
The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.
-
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
-
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.
-
What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.
-
Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
-
In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul.
-
Without work all life goes rotten.
-
It was in Spain that my generation learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.
-
You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us.
-
Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.
-
What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me - that I understand. And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?
-
Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.
-
The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
-
I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
-
They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.
-
There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.
-
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.
-
Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.
-
An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.
-
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
-
Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time.
-
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.
-
I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
-
We all have a weakness for beauty.