Albert Camus Quotes
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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.
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For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.
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Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
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What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.
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Without work all life goes rotten.
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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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In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul.
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The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.
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Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.
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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.
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Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.
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The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
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There may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones.
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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?
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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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I don't want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
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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.
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We all have a weakness for beauty.
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An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.
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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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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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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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Gilbert Jonas, painter, believed in his star.... His own faith was not, however, without its virtues because it consisted in admitting, in some obscure way, that he would obtain many things without deserving them.
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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.