Albert Camus Quotes
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If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
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There is no frontier between being and appearing.
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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.
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You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
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I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.
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There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbour while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
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Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
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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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A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.
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All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly.
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Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.
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Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.
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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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Human relationships always help us to carry on because they always presuppose further developments, a future - and also because we live as if our only task was precisely to have relationships with other people.
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Everyone would like to behave like a pagan, with everyone else behaving like a Christian.
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A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.
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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 temptation shared by all forms of intelligence: cynicism.
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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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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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Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne...Oh no! It's a...long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.
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Can one be a saint if God does not exist? That is the only concrete problem I know of today.
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Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.
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The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, 'less.